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Pastoral Homilies 

DELIVERED AS COMMENCEMENT ADDRESSES TO THE 

GRADUATING CLASSES OF THE ALLEGHENY 

THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 



BY 



JAMES A. GRIER, D.D., LL.D. 

PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF 

DIDACTIC AND POLEMIC THEOLOGY IN THE 

ALLEGHENY THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 



INTRODUCTION BY 
JOHN McNAUGHER, D.D., LL.D. 



United Presbyterian Board of Publication 

Pittsburgh, Pa. 

1909 



^JA 



Copyright, 1909, by the 

UNITED PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION 

PITTSBURGH, PA. 



£CL4253! 



LIST OF ADDRESSES 



Loyalty to the Truth. 

Conservatism and Aggression. 

The Young Minister as a Student. 

Doctrinal Preaching. 

Self-Respect. 

The Minister Under Orders. 

The Use of Good Sense in the Ministry. 

The Pastoral Office. 

Reminders.* 

A Minister's Sense of Responsibility. 

A Handful of Wisdom. 

Pauline Counsels to Young Men. 

Problems Confronting the Young Minister. 

Christ the Guide of the Young Minister. 

The Dignity of the Christian Ministry. 

Reminders. 

The Allegiance of the Gospel Minister. 

Qualifications for the Gospel Ministry. 



* The address of 1900 was omitted from the Commencement 
because of the services in connection with the Seventy-fifth 
Anniversary of the Seminary. It was printed at the time in 
The United Presbyterian, but in 1907 was used as a part of the 
graduation exercises. 



1892 


PAGE 
1 


1893 


9 


1894 


18 


1895 


26 


1896 


35 


1897 


46 


1898 


57 


1899 


69 


1900 


143 


1901 


82 


1902 


93 


1903 


103 


1904 


112 


1905 


124 


1906 


132 


1907 


143 


1908 


151 


1909 


160 



INTKODUCTION 

That my well-loved friend and former colleague 
has yielded to persuasion by permitting the publica- 
tion of his commencement addresses will gratify all 
his former students and very many besides. From 
the time that Dr. Grier became the President of the 
Seminary Faculty until his retirement in 1909, by 
reason of physical disability, the main feature of the 
graduation exercises each year was his parting coun- 
sels to the outgoing class. The audiences that gath- 
ered annually in the historic First Church to greet 
the young men completing their theological course 
were always expectant of these words of leave-taking 
with which the service closed, nor were they ever dis- 
appointed. 

In these short pastorals Dr. Grier appears at his 
best. They are the product not only of a well-stored 
and reflective mind, but of a deeply disciplined Chris- 
tian life. Doctrinal firmness is coupled with a genial 
catholic spirit, and moral force with a broad human 
sympathy. Only a man of robust type, of religious 
warmth, of ministerial experience, of subtle insight 
into present-day problems and situations, and of a 
delicate emotional susceptibility could have written 
them. Perception, grasp, judgment, and aptness are 
everywhere in evidence. Their style is marked by 
simplicity and vigor. The terse sentences are living 
creatures with hands and feet, to use a phrase of 



vi INTRODUCTION 

Luther's, and follow one another with rapid stride. 
Striking illustrations, touches of wit, epigrams, and 
a sprinkling of flavorous colloquialisms forbid any 
approach to dulness. 

The limitations of these addresses are fixed by their 
valedictory character. Of necessity they range among 
subjects related to the occasion which drew them forth. 
Yet between the lines they reveal a scholar more than 
equal to his calling, one at home in the realm of theo- 
logical thought and familiar with Biblical criticism 
and ecclesiastical history. The pity is that Seminary 
labors were so abundant and exacting as to leave no 
leisure for authorship such as would have enriched 
the Church's literature. 

Within the limitations indicated, this book will have 
lasting value. By the men who were privileged to sit 
at Dr. Grier's feet in the class-room, with all of whom 
he was on terms of true comradeship, it will be wel- 
comed as the advice of a trusted and beloved teacher, 
who has brought forth out of his treasure things new 
and old. Its bracing appeals to stand in the old paths 
of truth and to uphold the dignity and fulfil the 
duties of the ministry will come to them freighted 
with the impressiveness of the original delivery. For 
readers, too, who are outside the circle of Dr. Grier's 
students these homilies have messages full of inspira- 
tion and helpful suggestion. Ministers especially, as 
well as those preparing for the sacred offices of the 
pulpit and pastorate, will find them instructive and 
stimulating in no ordinary degree. 

John McNaugher 

The Allegheny Theological Seminary 



AN EXPLANATOKY NOTE 

A word of explanation in regard to this book is 
not out of place. It is composed of addresses to 
senior classes upon successive commencement occa- 
sions. At one time the policy of the Seminary was 
to bring in some one from abroad to do the chief 
speaking. This proved unsatisfactory, and so the plan 
was adopted to provide the literary features of the 
commencement through the services of a number of 
young men of the class, and a more extended address 
by the President of the Faculty. This book has been 
compiled from the latter source. Its origin accounts 
for the measure of similarity in the various addresses 
and for the color of its thought upon issues prominent 
from time to time. Its publication has been almost 
against the judgment of its author and has been per- 
mitted in order to satisfy the wishes of the many 
students who are interested in having such a memorial 
of their Seminary days. It is sent forth with good 
wishes for them all. 

The Author 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 

LOYALTY TO THE TRUTH 

Dear Brethren of the Class of 1892: 

Your stay with us has been very pleasant, but the 
time has come, as such times do come, to bid you fare- 
well. We are sorry to do so, and yet glad eighteen 
more young men, consecrated, as we think, to Christ, 
and qualified by talents and culture, are thus sent out 
to preach the everlasting gospel to men, and to bear 
witness for the honor of our Lord. We bid you ' ' God- 
speed " in your ministry, with long life and pros- 
perity, so far as it shall serve God's glory and your 
own good. 

But before you go from us, your instructors would 
add another lesson to the many already given, and 
seek to deepen the bias at which we have aimed. Some 
things we take for granted as to your future history 
and work; for example, we believe you will be men 
of earnest, dependent, and believing prayer. You 
understand, dear brethren, there is no success with- 
out it. You will be happy and useful ministers of the 
Word in the ratio of real devotion. Do not forget it. 
Do not fail to tread much the path to the mercy seat. 
We count on success in your official work. You are 
apparently qualified in every natural way. See that 
1 



2 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

you make full proof of your ministry, both in winning 
souls and in building up saints. This will finally 
certify your call to the work. Unless these results 
attend you, notwithstanding all prior convictions as 
to your call, you have none; and if for a lengthened 
period, while engaged in pulpit work, nominally active 
in the pastorate, you should find yourselves lacking in 
these marks of the approbation of the Head of the 
Church, the question of the divine withdrawal of 
your commission to serve as ministers in the pastorate 
will be before you. Unhappy will you be if the rea- 
son is found in coldness of soul, a loss of spiritual 
skill. It will become you with haste "to repent and 
do the first works." 

We count on your loj^alty to your Church. It is 
that of your fathers. In it you were born in covenant. 
It will be a serious thing even to debate stepping out 
of your inheritance. You will never be as welcome 
in any other fold of the flock. If ever you should 
feel disposed to withdraw, you would best carefully 
scrutinize your motives, and re-examine your Church 's 
positions. Going a little deeper often helps oscilla- 
ting spirits to discover how well their fathers built, 
and their nearness and ours to that "foundation no 
man can lay. ' ' We hold to-day as full a body of the 
truth of God as any Church in the whole imperial 
domain of our Lord and His Christ. It is one of the 
fullest creeds of all Christendom. In certain features 
it is almost peculiar truth; and even in some things 
in which we have shared with others, there is prospect 
it will become largely peculiar to ourselves in the 
future. 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 3 

Because of the needs of truth the days are not yet 
here when denominational lines can be safely broken 
down. Nor are any of us likely to see them. They 
are necessary to the truth, because it is men who are 
entrusted with it. They arise from the angles of 
mind, the points of structure, in which men differ 
from one another. They also providentially become 
barriers to licentious theological doctrine, and check 
and often defeat the tide of sloppy and sentimental 
and wholly uninspired theology which tends to iden- 
tify the Church and the world. They enable the 
Church to economize its forces and do the best work 
in the gospel. A Christian minister's life must, there- 
fore, ordinarily, be spent within some sort of denom- 
inational boundaries. They are usually wide enough 
for most of us. We are neither geniuses nor mounte- 
banks, and they afford full field for all our powers, 
and as much liberty as bodies of men are able to 
exercise. 

With due regard to them, therefore, you are to live 
and work. You are to be Christian ministers, but 
Christian ministers of your own denomination. You 
make a fundamental mistake if you seek to undenomi- 
nationalize your denomination. No other Church will 
join you and seek to break itself down. All you can 
do in such work is to sell us out or give us away to 
other denominations, which will not return the com- 
pliment. They are here to stay; so are we. There 
will be, until Christ comes, lines of distinction in His 
Church. Yet this is perfectly consistent with large 
Christian comity, genial neighborliness, united work 
in reforms, conjoint efforts for revival, exchange of 



4 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

pulpits, flexibility in methods of work, and, generally- 
speaking, more or less interflow of congregational and 
denominational life. To be stiff is not to be strong; 
and yet to be strong you must have some stiffening. 
You will make a mistake if you put your denomina- 
tion before your Christianity, and almost as great a 
blunder if you put it very much behind your Chris- 
tianity. The two are very much like faith and re- 
pentance ; one is logically in advance of the other, but 
practically they go together. We wish you, therefore, 
with all our hearts, to be strong Christian ministers 
of the United Presbyterian denomination, not ecclesi- 
astical weathercocks, turning with every wind of doc- 
trine, because far from the foundations. 

We expect you to be students of the Word of God. 
You will bear us witness that, while some are critical 
of seminary methods, the teaching you have received 
has not been simply scriptural, but largely in the 
Scriptures. Everything has been clustered around 
the Bible. We have had no ambition except to teach 
you the Word of God, and fit you for teaching the 
same volume to others. Now that you go out from us, 
do not cease to study the Scriptures. They contain 
your message. God will give you no other; you will 
have none for sinful men if you do not find it there, 
no matter how much men applaud your other utter- 
ances. But you must keep it under constant scrutiny 
if you will know its contents. In the old story the ma- 
gician 's ring commanded the genii only when it was 
rubbed and furbished. You will have the power of 
the Good Spirit only when you keep your mind bright 
with the whole circle of revealed divine truth. 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 5 

Many men fall short of the expectations of friends 
and of the Church because they largely cease to 
study the truth. Appliances are not secured, or, if 
they are, are almost laid aside. The library is pinched 
and narrow, and oh! so mustily old. Time is not 
given to patient, delving toil. Independent exegesis 
is a lost art. The fields of theology are only cursorily 
and spasmodically scanned. So it is the creed is not 
comprehended, and so they join with the mob in de- 
manding the revision of what is all the same to them 
as the hieroglyphs. Their shelves are empty of Church 
history. The new homiletics, as they arise, are not 
understood. There is no saturation with the spirit of 
the gospel ages. There is little absorption of the best 
Church life of the times. There is lack of a great 
ambition, and an earnest purpose, and a high ideal, 
and a perpetual effort. So it is they come to have 
shrivelled powers, a low professional level, and a 
meagre ministry. No man ministers much who does 
not minister by the truth, and it is superficial min- 
istry unless he understands his foundations. 

If any of you fail, not only to be measurably use- 
ful, but to be known and felt throughout the Church, 
it will be chiefly because you cease to work. Re- 
member that. It is the history of a multitude. A 
first talisman of success is hard work. It is a prime 
gift of the Holy Ghost. 

Moreover, young brethren, you must bring to your 
study of the Bible the recognition that it is the Word 
of God. If not, your resulting thought will be laden 
with antagonism — all unconsciously, perhaps, to your- 
selves — to the kingdom of Christ, and the best spiritual 



6 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

interests of men. As God's interpreters you will have 
neither intellectual nor moral room for such a formula 
as, "the Bible contains the Word of God." That 
will put you on the search for lines of division be- 
tween the human and divine in it, and make your 
poor selves the best test of what of the oracles are 
to be offered to men as true and what kept back as 
error. You are not to be like the screen at a coal 
mine, which selects what it will and lets the rest go 
through. By much use in this way your mental and 
spiritual meshes will grow large enough to let the 
whole of the Book through. 

The good minister of God must have some canon 
by which to gauge the value of the written Word. 
Paul gave a good one to Timothy: "All Scripture is 
given by inspiration of God, and is profitable." Or 
you can read it the other way: "All Scripture given 
by inspiration of God is profitable"; aud the thought 
in either case is that all God's Word is trustworthy. 
A man who preaches to save souls must have con- 
fidence in his Bible. If he does not, the souls will 
have confidence in neither him nor his Bible. 

If he is to confide in the Book intelligently, he 
must have some good theory of its measure of inspira- 
tion. Every lover of the Book does, even though he 
does not formulate his idea, and is, perhaps, scarcely 
aware of its possession. If he does formulate he may 
call it "dynamic" inspiration, or "plenary" inspira- 
tion, or "verbal" inspiration, or "plenary verbal" 
inspiration, or, if he wants to be very sure he is right, 
"plenary, verbal, dynamic inspiration." What he 
wants is not merely a name, but the fact. 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 7 

We commend to you, therefore, that grand old doe- 
trine of the ages — and it is the doctrine of the ages 
— " verbal inspiration," which you have been taught 
in the class-room, and which allows to the inspiring 
Spirit wisdom and omnipotence, and to the inspired 
penmen of Scripture the free and untrammeled use 
of their minds, God not ceasing to be God, and man 
not ceasing to be free man. This is the biblical doc- 
trine, whose application by the Holy Ghost has pro- 
vided a collection of Holy Scripture, whose minute 
measure of subsequent, infloating human error is, after 
all that is said, of a very minor character. 

It is natural for young men to accept pretensions 
to learning and wisdom, without very close inquiry 
into the merits of those that make them. There is 
much of this pretension to-day, concerning which you 
are to be on your guard. An imperial egotism has 
seized some who handle and criticise the Word of 
God. Many conclusions are being foisted upon the 
Church which are alien to her creeds and her best 
scholarship. The most charitable thing to be said of 
them is that they are crude and immature. Let it 
be understood they do not represent the body of 
Christian scholarship, and there is no evidence they 
ever will. We have had noise and clamor before, and 
even garments rolled in blood; but, after all, Arius, 
and Ballou, and Colenso, and the rest of them, have 
little place in the Church's heart to-day. We still 
believe Jesus Christ is "very God of very God, be- 
gotten, not made/' and that God saves only those 
who seize upon the glories of eternity while in time. 
There is the same noisy clamor now, a crying, "Lo, 



8 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

here is truth, and lo, there!" "Go ye not after 
them." The Church has not yet moved. It will be 
time for you to go when she does. Keep in her com- 
pany. She has not yet gathered her strength to brush 
these noises away. But she will, so far as they do not 
keep chord with a true inspiration. In the mean- 
time do not adventure upon the acceptance of theories 
that do violence to the consensus of the ages ; that not 
only turn biblical history out of channels of inspira- 
tion, but make it a mere quagmire of dubious facts. 

Young gentlemen, you are to preach chiefly Church 
truth; truth as it is in the creeds, subject, of course, 
to the corrections of the Scriptures themselves, but 
recognizing the Church as the very best interpreter. 
And when the fog has cleared away, you will be glad 
you awaited a clear sky, and be ready to pick up 
whatever of manna has fallen to the ground. The 
probability is that it will be small, very small, like 
grains of coriander seed, and not very abundant. 

Brethren ! brethren ! hold fast to God 's Word, and 
not to the passing ' ' fads " of a swollen and bombastic 
scholarship, reflecting all the colors of the rainbow, 
and leaving chiefly ashes and bitterness in your 
mouths when God has blown upon them. Believe that 
the Bible God gave is the truth, and may God aid you 
to be loyal to these sacred books, until you shall come 
to the opening of the other books, and the rewards 
of faithful ministers of our Lord Jesus Christ. 



CONSERVATISM AND AGGRESSION 

Dear Brethren of the Class of 1893: 

You have successfully finished your course of study, 
and, as you pass out from tutelage to active duties, 
a few words of final instruction and counsel seem 
entirely fitting. Of course they are especially adapted 
to United Presbyterian students, but the others of 
you have learned how to extract what is suitable to 
your denominational allegiance, and your skill is per- 
mitted and asked to have full play. I wish to say 
to you: 

I. — You are to Minister in a Conservative Church 

Religion is nothing if not decently conservative. 
The doctrines of God and the relations of the soul 
to Him do not change. Once spiritually intelligent in 
these, the soul has reached its rest. Being pious is 
not taking a voyage of discovery. It is not exercis- 
ing the gift of the inventor. There are now no 
Bezaleels, the sons of Uri, to build the tabernacle. 
It is already pitched, by God, and not man. There 
are no artisans to fashion anew the altar. It has 
been erected, and has borne its sacrifice. There are 
no Hilkiahs to discover the Book in the rubbish of 
our church temple. It is open before us. And there 
9 



10 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

ought to be no scribes to make it speak in syllables 
as uncertain as those of the priestess of Delphi. Nor 
is being religious dallying with every new wave of 
thought and feeling that placards itself " science,' ' 
or labels itself " devotion." A chief element in re- 
ligion is ''holding fast the form of sound words" 
given by God. There are no new revelations, and 
there are very few new angles of vision for the old 
doctrines. When the "new" things we are asked to 
believe are held out to a good focus, and the daylight 
gets fairly on them, they are usually either deformed 
half truths, or illogical combinations of truth; very 
often mouldy old heresies, with only a new name. The 
true Christian scheme is an old faith, as old as the 
eternal covenant, and the very fact we are limited to 
a finished Book for our religion constrains to con- 
servatism, if we are truly faithful. 

Certainly this condition of things does not forbid 
the possibility of real discoveries within the allotted 
domain; but after nineteen centuries of careful and 
loyal investigation, and in view of the perpetual 
tendency of present discoverers to get into the slag 
heaps the Church has cast off in developing her doc- 
trine, there is really little new or practically valuable 
truth to be secured. 

There must also, of course, always be new adjust- 
ments of the old truth to new providential demands. 

The Church of your choice has long seen both the 
essential limitations and requirements of faith, and 
so, while undefined in details, she has witnessed for 
truth in no half-hearted way, and upon a very wide 
circle of fundamentals. You will find many, and 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 11 

even some of our own, who regard us as founded on 
two or three distinctives, and as offering no other 
reason for our existence. They are to be commiser- 
ated, and instructed. The fact is, few Churches, even 
those calling themselves " liberal," have as broad 
ground as we. If being liberal means narrow f ounda- 
tions, we are not entitled to the epithet. If it means 
a most free-handed use of truth upon which to build 
the denomination, we step into the front rank. One 
denomination builds chiefly on government by bishops, 
another, on government by the body of the people ; one 
on a human prayer-book and the figment of apostolic 
succession; and another on the idea that through 
much water we enter the kingdom. This type of reed 
is not long enough to measure our foundations. It 
is not with us wholly or chiefly a matter of psalmody 
and anti-oathbound secrecy, with sacraments under 
the control of sessions, as is all other administration ; 
but it is a matter of inspiration of the Scriptures, the 
atonement, imputed righteousness, evangelical faith 
and repentance, the headship of Christ, and a number 
of other important principles of faith and practice; 
in all, eighteen. These things we emphasize, and upon 
them build the Church. Shall I call the roll of the 
doctrines of the United Presbyterian Testimony? 
The plenary inspiration of the Scriptures ; the eternal 
sonship of Christ; the covenant of works; human in- 
ability ; nature and extent of the atonement ; imputed 
righteousness; the gospel offer; saving faith; evan- 
gelical repentance; the believer's deliverance from 
the law as a covenant; the work of the Holy Spirit; 
the headship of Christ; anti-slaveholding ; supremacy 



12 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

of God 's law ; anti-oathbound secrecy ; restricted com- 
munion; covenanting; inspired psalmody. 

Here are the reasons why we are planted among 
the Churches, and, as we believe, have an important 
purpose to fulfil in this land. Some of these points 
are in the line of efforts elsewhere now being made 
for revision of the Confession, notably "The Gospel 
Call," as displaying the love of God to mankind 
sinners as such. Your Church is not behind the age. 
These eighteen reasons display the loyal genius of 
your denomination. It is not that some, and even 
many, Christians elsewhere do not hold some of them, 
but that all Christians do not, and some whose creeds 
contain a portion practically excuse from their ac- 
ceptance; while "other some" are ignored by almost 
all. The United Presbyterian Church seeks to be a 
witness for the full doctrine of the gospel upon points 
where ultimate truth has been reached, and where 
there can be no fresh discoveries. Along the major 
lines of the faith she finds no open questions. There 
are none. 

It is not correct, therefore, to think of the Church 
particularly as singing Psalms and as refusing to take 
an oath which requires to do thus and so or be 
* ' quartered and buried in the sands of the sea. ' ' She 
is just as distinct and tenacious on the far more fun- 
damental doctrine of plenary inspiration of the Scrip- 
tures; she is not more emphatic on secret oathbound 
societies than on an absolutely vicarious atonement, 
which was neither aimlessly wrought nor without 
quality sufficient to save all men; neither does she 
place more stress on restricted communion than on 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 13 

the headship of the Mediator over the universe to the 
good of His people. Your Church is a sensible one, 
and does not exalt what is really the less important 
truth over that of greater magnitude. She does not 
find her charter in her praises, in the external fellow- 
ships of her members, nor in her wise control of the 
holy sacraments, but in these and in other things of 
equal or greater importance; and she believes the 
gospel which has the best hope in it for men and for 
the glory of God moves along these lines. You will 
understand, therefore, brethren, that you are to be, 
and your Church through you, conservators of the 
whole truth of God as it is revealed, and that the 
denomination expects it of you. 

II. — You are to Minister in an Aggressive 
Denomination 

True spiritual aggression does not much consist in 
onslaughts on ancient doctrine, in patching up an am- 
biguous creed, and calling everybody "brother"; but 
in devising and doing vigorous things against the 
enemias of the gospel. There is a natural reason why 
your Church has been, in the main, on the right side 
of the great reforms — anti-slavery, and temperance, 
and the sanctity of the Sabbath. It is that the habit 
of holding on to truth makes all truth precious. There 
is also a logical reason, and it is that the doctrine 
of the headship of Christ over all things tends to 
make its holders earnest to reduce all to subservience 
to His law. The crown rights of the Mediator are 
seen to entitle Him to be governor over men every- 



14 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

where. It is to excuse a lack of zeal for His kingdom 
when men announce "they are in favor of redemption 
rather than reform. ' ' We want no reform except that 
whose genius is allied to Him Who is the priest, and 
not simply the priest, but the king as well; and no 
Church does her full duty unless she carries in her 
hands alike the offer of Christ's sacrificial work and 
the moral law as the statutes of the universal King. 
Your Church has been, from the first, among the 
foremost in missionary enterprises. She has heard 
and is bearing the great commission, "Go ye into all 
the world. ' ' The result is the splendid work in India 
and Egypt. The same energy has been shown in the 
Home Boards. The duty of the denomination to the 
country and the world is distinctly recognized. The 
glory of the Church will have gone, even should she 
maintain her purity of doctrine, if she shall lose her 
interest in purely missionary work, at home and 
abroad. "Faith without works is dead," in a man 
or a Church. Many a man cries, "Credo!" I be- 
lieve, who might as well shout " Non credo! " — I do 
not believe, so far as practical work is concerned. 
Happily, a dead orthodoxy is coming to be in the 
nostrils of men like Lazarus' body when it had been 
dead four days. Truth was never meant to be a 
brake upon the chariot of the gospel, nor a truth- 
speaking minister a brakeman. If he makes that his 
business, he would best be unloaded. Whatever im- 
petus the Holy Ghost imparts through the truth, is 
to be conserved by every one of you. You are to 
maintain and increase evangelistic activity, to be not 
only witnesses but workmen, to seek out men for 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 15 

the ministry, and men and women for Home and 
Foreign fields. So shall the time be ushered in when 
the clonds shall reveal Him and the kingdom of glory- 
be hastened. 

Upon this thought let me lay another item, and 
one really vital to our denomination. It is her educa- 
tion. She has always had one of the best educated 
ministries in the nation; but she is in serious danger 
of falling behind. The enormous endowments planted 
here and there, and the general quickening of interest 
in educational matters, have not yet aroused us fully 
to our needs, and the imperative duty of more fully 
providing for this important arm of our work. The 
Church must remember, and you must keep her in 
mind of the fact, that the creed and heart possession 
of gospel truth, combined with most zealous foreign 
and home evangelization, will not maintain and pro- 
mote her power. The Moravian Church is the stand- 
ing example of devout zeal in missions, being inade- 
quate to build into the largest usefulness. She forgot 
her education, and, as a result, her growth has been 
small, and her influence lessened. We must be care- 
ful not to make that mistake. Our schools of learn- 
ing must, therefore, be sedulously fostered by endow- 
ment and appointment. We must not trust to mere 
denominational attachments for our stability and 
growth, but to intelligent, business-like care of such 
institutions as the colleges and seminaries. Out of 
this heart are the issues of our life. 

This duty will devolve largely on you as the leaders 
and counsellors of the people. If the same zeal was 
shown by our ministry in the cause of church educa- 



16 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

tion which it exhibits for missions, five years would 
see our schools out of their struggles and the Church 
on the highway of the best success. Young brethren, 
we trust you will be most intelligent here, and, while 
not abating zeal for missions, seek to arouse a larger 
interest in that upon which efficient missions depend, 
a strong, self-respectful, well-equipped, educated 
Church. Your class has enjoyed for three years a 
peculiar pleasure and honor — the presence and mem- 
bership of a lady, and of one who has been a stimulus 
and aid to all. As a faculty we were pleased to open 
the doors of the seminary to her, and greatly grati- 
fied when the board of directors unanimously agreed 
to admit her to examination for our diploma, which, 
with the others of the class, by direction of the board, 
she will receive. These letters of credit, as you un- 
derstand, are official statements respecting the scholar- 
ship attained, nothing more; they are not authority 
for the exercise of gifts as preachers; with that the 
seminary has nothing to do. We educate and the 
courts of the Church pass decisions upon all of you 
as candidates for the ministry. By them disqualifica- 
tions of sex or of other nature will be regarded. The 
board and faculty are a unit in the belief that the 
office of the ministry is not open to women. But we 
recognize that some women are desirous of the knowl- 
edge and culture a theological course brings, and that 
others wish to prepare themselves for various lines of 
Christian work in the Home and Foreign fields. We 
do not feel disposed to shut the doors of knowledge 
against them. Because of this disposition we are 
pleased to place our diploma in the hands of your 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 17 

classmate as one of three ladies, daughters of Phoebe, 
this year being graduated from American theological 
institutions. 

And now, dear friends, farewell. "We send you 
out gladly, because the Church needs workmen, offi- 
cial and unofficial, who need not be ashamed. Such 
is every one of you. May you find happy fields of 
labor and usefulness, spend long lives in serving the 
Master, and at length come up before God with your 
sheaves to receive the plaudit and the crown of those 
who are faithful unto death. And may those who 
have been taught and those who have taught them in 
this school of the prophets together learn from the 
lips of our Great Prophet, the Son of God. 



THE YOUNG MINISTER AS A STUDENT 

Dear Brethren of the Class op 1894: 

In view of the lengthened character of this even- 
ing's exercises, it seems best to offer you only a few 
brief parting words. May they be accounted valu- 
able by you in many years of the useful ministry 
upon whose threshold you now stand. 

It seems fitting to say to you that your lives should 
continue to be those of students. God has given you 
powers which have only begun to develop. Your 
ministry, though now acceptable to the people, has 
much room for growth in all the elements of real 
power. The youthful rhetorical excellence which has 
chiefly marked your pulpit work, and which has 
pleased very many, and none so much as your in- 
structors, should be but the precursor of even a better 
pulpit style. It should unfold into a larger, richer, 
and more impressive vehicle of the essential truth 
of the gospel. With it should be associated fuller and 
juster views of the truth, and its especial points of 
adaptation to the sermon, and thus to men. This, in 
a theoretical way, you recognize. Be very sure that 
your persistent purpose and habit of life be such as 
will bring you a growing ripeness, and an increasing 
influence for good. 

A chief means to these is laborious and faithful 
study. There is much said, and to be said, respecting 
18 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 19 

the necessity of the minister's consecration. We can- 
not too much urge upon you to be wholly given to 
God for work in the gospel. Nevertheless consecra- 
tion is of little value if there is poverty in the ma- 
terials devoted. All the devotion possible at any altar 
will not fit a poor instrument for important service. 
A consecrated snuffers in the tabernacle was good as 
snuffers, but the mission was not strikingly important. 
A Salvation Army drum may be wholly set apart to 
sacred uses, but all it can do is to bellow. A minister 
may not be much better than either. He may almost 
certainly reckon it will be so unless he persists in 
cultivating his faculties and increasing his knowledge. 

An acute perception of conditions and an increas- 
ingly full mind are absolutely necessary to general 
acceptance and growing usefulness. If the student 
come to a standstill, he will go back. Mind rusts 
except along the channels of use. Faculties atrophy 
which are not called into play. Intellectual powers 
shrivel which are not fed by knowledge. Many an 
idle man knows less ten years after he leaves the 
seminary than when, in the flush of even unusual 
promise, he received his diploma. The mediocre fre- 
quently surpasses his talented brother because the 
talents are buried in a napkin. Napery is excellent 
for table uses, but never was meant for the burial 
robes of a living mind. Even a bit of it at the 
throat is no conclusive credential of a good minister. 

Heed the counsel, my brothers, and keep at work. 
Midnight oil is a scarcer article than you may sup- 
pose, and any minister who gets a supply will find it 
an excellent lubricator for his brain and a fragrant 



20 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

unguent upon his ministry. Do you know there are 
no plateaus for him who climbs Mount Zion? The 
Church is mounting to the city of the great King, 
and she will pass the laggard who rests on a shelf of 
the rocky highway. 

Sometimes we find a young seminarian who stands 
in affright at the two sermons per week of the pas- 
torate. He never can get them. He tugs and per- 
spires over the one assigned him in the school. He 
ransacks the library, digging out exegesis until he 
looks like a miner, and often gets more soot than 
exegesis. He enters a pastorate where there is not 
much intellectual attrition, and lo! in two or three 
years we hear of a marvelous change. He will even 
go as a speaker to an important conference with only 
a few bald heads of discourse! He has gotten to 
running around the parish all the week until Friday, 
visiting, eating, gossiping, making himself believe he 
is doing pastoral work. If he would only stop a little 
he might hear Jeremiah crying after him, "Why 
gaddest thou about so much?" It serves no really 
good purpose. When Friday comes, with the feeling 
of a martyr schoolboy, he enters his study, which has 
not been warmed since the week before, closes the 
door and plunges into the middle of things. Prob- 
ably he is without even a text. He keeps on the 
stretch until Saturday night. He thoroughly empties 
himself. The pump whistles when he is done. Every- 
thing he knows, and some things he does not know, 
are poured into the awful vacuum of those sermons. 
He disgorges on the Sabbath a crude, undigested mass, 
which the people try to dispose of during the week. 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 21 

By and by he grows to dislike his study so much 
he stays out until Saturday morning. Occasionally 
he is so unspeakably foolish as to put off preparation 
until the Sabbath. A few times he is so far left to 
himself as to have no text until he reaches the pulpit. 
After a while the soot, that used to be on his hands 
and face when a student, gets into his cranium. It 
is the lot of the preacher to have soot somewhere. At 
length some little stir arises in the congregation, and 
his hold on the people is so small it is made the oc- 
casion for his removal. The cause is farther back, 
in those idle gossiping days when he read the news- 
papers only, and wore out his saddle on the parish. 
He was laying the foundation for his ruin. 

People to this day laugh at Gen. Pope's dispatch 
dated "Headquarters in the Saddle." If the minister 
turns himself into a cavalryman he will eventually 
become a laughing-stock, or worse. If I recall aright, 
the general got the worst of that campaign, and you 
will surely have the same fortune if your head- 
quarters are anywhere else than in your study six 
long forenoons out of seven. You may count the 
Sabbath into the number. No matter what demands 
the parish makes on you, it will not relax its claims 
upon your pulpit. If you permit pastoral, church 
court, or any other work, to destroy your studious 
habits, you will surely come to grief should you seek 
to remain in the pastorate; and very likely you will 
become a sort of New Testament Ishmael, soured 
and crabbed, and disposed to a small kind of war- 
fare in the Church which withholds desired recogni- 
tion. 



22 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

What then? Get books, get new books, and if the 
congregation gives your wife some of the silver seign- 
iorage, perhaps you might borrow some of it and buy 
yet more books. It will be the best family invest- 
ment, and you will surely be able to repay the good 
woman with compound interest. It is worth while to 
remember also that Robert Hall did not marry until 
he was over forty, and Dean Stanley until he was 
forty-four. But they had plenty of books; and the 
books made them what they were. I mean simply 
that intellectual qualification is a sine qua nan to 
your ministry. 

When you have three hundred or four hundred 
well-chosen volumes, you will be equipped for begin- 
ning work. This is not ideal, but a very low estimate, 
unless you propose for yourself a very narrow circle. 
You will get narrow if you do not have and use a 
good library; and it is not to be all theology. One 
biographer of a minister mentions to his praise that 
he had no commentaries, and therefore was an ex- 
cellent gospel preacher. Possibly he was good, but 
how much better if he had given himself better ad- 
vantages. Put it into your wills that such facts shall 
not appear in your biographies, especially since you 
live in an age when books are almost the cheapest 
articles in the market. Better still, give no such 
opportunity to a blundering biographer. To books 
add magazines and reviews sufficient to keep abreast 
of the times. You never should come to the place 
where a special paper is an affliction, or a newspaper 
article on any subject a mild agony. 

A country pastorate is no reason why you should 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 23 

not attain the best theological culture. James McCosh 
came from a modest Scottish parish to Belfast on the 
merits of his "Divine Government, ' ' composed amid 
quiet, unstinmlating surroundings. Jeremy Taylor 
wrote his "Holy Living and Dying," the epoch-mak- 
ing book "On the Liberty of Prophesying," and all 
his great works during an enforced seclusion in AVales. 
The country parish is the very scene for the best 
mental improvement. Ah, the opportunities you will 
have in the long forenoons and the uninterrupted 
evenings! The country prophets, as well as those in 
Jerusalem, read everything at hand on their subjects 
before they prophesied. They are good models. They 
never went out to the people with an extemporized 
message, or with one on which they had not done their 
level human best in connection with the inspiration 
of the Holy Ghost. You will not have inspiration, 
but you will have spiritual illumination if you are 
holy men — and work. You will not have much of it 
if you are empty-headed and lazy, no matter how 
much you pray. 

Here, then, are the parting lessons which your in- 
structors assign you: work in exegesis; work in his- 
tory; work in theology; work in homiletics. We bid 
you go into your closets and shut your doors, and 
pray to your Father in secret, and then open your 
books. Keep them open. You will often need, in the 
midst of your work, to pray the prayer of the West- 
minster man, when the debate was hottest, and error 
was proudest, "Da lucem, Domine," "Lord, give 
light," and then, out of the stores of his learning, 
routed the enemy. But do not forget it is to be the 



24 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

prayer of the workman who does not seek to thrust 
in his heart where he should use his brain. 

On these lessons we will not hold examinations, but 
the Church will, and she will do it thoroughly. We 
bid you Godspeed in getting your library, and in at- 
taining self-denial to secure a new volume ; in learning 
how to lock yourself in regularly and long, whether 
you are in the mood or not; in coming into close fel- 
lowship with the Light-Giver ; in making the most out 
of your intellectual mission in the gospel; and in 
knowing when to open the door and come out to 
mount your horse or exchange your slippers for walk- 
ing shoes to go joyously and in growing power on the 
errands of the pastor welcome among his people. 

Remember that the period of your ministry at the 
longest is short. One of your number, dear brother 
Dick, has already finished his on the earth, and has 
gone up from the company of his books, and his fel- 
low-students, and his teachers to be a student in the 
school of the Temple, and to learn from the lips and 
see the face of the Great Teacher. It is delightful 
to remember him as a good man and a growing mind, 
one of whose last acts was to publish a paper defensive 
of the Christian faith, such as was possible only to a 
student of divine things; and whose very last act as 
a minister of the gospel was to preach such a sermon 
on the resurrection of believers as could come only 
from a heart and brain cultured in the revelation of 
God. His last request, as he left our midst, was that 
his diploma should be sent to him in the western city 
in the care of his father. It will be done. But he 
has gone to his heavenly Father's house, and the 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 25 

credentials lie took with him there were a being re- 
generated by grace, and a life consecrated to seeking 
fitness to proclaim the unsearchable riches of Christ. 
Dear brethren, may you all be able in like manner 
to pass up, one after another, from the faithful study 
and proclamation of the Word written to rejoice in 
the tuition of the Personal Word, Who is the Son of 
God, and with him so soon departed and all saints, 
enjoy the ineffable glories of the "resurrection of the 
just" when our Lord shall come. 



DOCTRINAL PREACHING 

Dear Brethren of the Class of 1895: 

Most people have a dislike to doctrinal sermons, at 
least to what they account as doctrinal. Said a bright 
member of a congregation to a candidate for its 
pulpit, whose success was desired, "Don't preach a 
doctrinal sermon!" That was to dig a pit and fall 
therein, and be buried under the dry dust of his own 
raising. But the preacher persisted in his design, 
probably because it was that sermon or nothing, and 
on the strength of it was called to the pastorate, 
much to the delight of his friend, who sagely re- 
marked afterward, "I am so glad you took my ad- 
vice, and did not preach that doctrinal sermon. It 
would have slaughtered you. ' ' The preacher was wise 
enough to keep his own counsel, and accept the call. 
The fact is, a well-defined prejudice has grown up 
against doctrinal sermons without any well-defined 
reasons. Prejudice is not particular about reasons. 
I have known a gentleman who sat in a front pew 
waiting, open-eyed and open-hearted, on a certain 
ministry for months, and who took great pains to 
congratulate the pastor on the fact that his preaching 
was eminently scriptural and edifying, and had little 
of the dogmatism of his denomination, especially the 
last Sabbath's sermon. Unhappily, the pastor grew 
so tickled at the wholly misplaced compliment that 
26 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 27 

he was betrayed into saying: "That was election, 
pure and simple, you had last Sabbath," and so let 
out the secret that he was preaching doctrine. Like 
one of old, the admirer's countenance fell, and thence 
forward his pew was pretty regularly vacant. He 
did not propose to be inveigled into listening to doc- 
trinal discourses. He has not a few sympathizers. 

This antagonism to anything labelled "doctrine" 
is very probably inherited from the days when men 
were making systems of theology and taking them 
into the pulpit, exhibiting every philosophical, tech- 
nical bolt, and burr, and link the entire structure con- 
tained. Many sermons were then but a procession of 
theological skeletons, bone rattling against bone, and 
all very dry. Yet a mass of doctrinal preaching was 
necessary to promote the Reformation, and to develop 
later in fulness the doctrines of salvation, and we 
occupy our Christian heritage because they preached 
doctrines in those earlier times. When we get around 
to Reformation times again, it will be by the same 
old path of the saints. Bony sermons are not the 
worst sort. And yet these sermons were not always 
counted dull. Edwards could preach the severest 
doctrines without marshalling philosophical or bibli- 
cal skeletons; and the slain of the Lord were many. 
Charnock's monumental book on "The Attributes of 
God" was originally prepared as sermons, delivered 
to great congregations. Such successes indicate pos- 
sibilities to-day. 

I think a second reason for almost embittered hos- 
tility to doctrinal discourses is found in the popular- 
izing forces of the age. An occasional doctrinal 



28 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

preacher and theologian would, perhaps, say, "in the 
shallowness of the times." Yet there is no use in 
calling hard names, and finding fault with the times. 
That is no mark of good pastoral sense or pulpit 
judgment. Besides, the properly guided mind will 
run as deep now as ever it did since men began to 
think, even though it may be harder to make it do 
so. There is always a temptation to shallow plowing 
in farming and thinking in preaching; yet, there is 
just as much opportunity for deep plowing and 
preaching now as the world has ever known. There 
is, however, a difference in implements and methods, 
and one must know how to either preach or plow. 

The newspapers, the magazines, reviews, polite lit- 
erature, and the perpetual effort of the religious press 
to popularize the profound things have had their 
effect, and have led to a sort of intolerance toward 
a pulpit which resorts to any method of teaching 
truth, whether practical or doctrinal. The same in- 
difference is shown toward an old-time solid lecture 
on natural science as to dry religious truth. In- 
struction comes best now by way of maps, charts, 
ocular experiments, and the stereopticon. The text- 
books of fifty years ago in natural science, even in 
arithmetic, an exact science, have no value to-day, 
even though principles remain unchanged. Who 
would now think of putting a boy to school to the 
"Western Calculator," and "The English Reader," 
or "Murray's Grammar"? Even the preachers 
themselves have little use for the old text-books. The 
theological fathers, where are they? In the second- 
hand book stores. Who reads Turretin, or Pictet, or 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 29 

Doddridge's " Family Expositor "1 Even Matthew 
Henry is rapidly becoming a back number. The fact 
is, we set the example to our people ourselves in this 
matter of loose allegiance to old-time methods of stat- 
ing truth, even although we hold the truth itself most 
precious. It is a preacher's natural mistake to think 
popular antagonism to methods of publishing truth, 
to the garb of a doctrine, to the intricate processes of 
development and proof, is opposition to the doctrine 
itself ; and so he often empties his pulpit of the funda- 
mentals, and takes to what is called "practical preach- 
ing" instead. Inevitably he discounts his ministry, 
and often runs into bankruptcy. He loses his pulpit 
for lack of the very thing he thinks the people do 
not wish to hear. "Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones," said an 
old lady to her pastor, as she took him by the button 
after a somewhat soupy sermon, "you have been giv- 
ing us broth for a good while, and we would like a 
little solid meat, if you please. ' ' 

There is nothing the mass of churchgoers wish to 
hear so much as the substantials of revelation. Try 
it and see. But the packages make a difference. 
The grocer understands this about breakfast food and 
breakfast bacon. He sells them in illuminated wrap- 
pers. People are often really hungry for the solids 
the pulpit can furnish, but they are desirous that 
they shall be properly served and garnished. The 
other portions of their mental food do not come pre- 
pared by antique processes and soggy with explan- 
atory philosophy. Why should this? So they rea- 
son. Who can blame them? Roast beef is always 
better eaten at a neat table, behind a clean napkin, 



30 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

than when covered with ashes at a barbecue. Much 
depends on the way in which even beauty is clad. 
Rebekah looked the better for Isaac's earrings. 

Certainly people wish to be indoctrinated. A few 
care only to be stimulated, but the mass desire en- 
largement of religious intelligence. Every really good 
and every phenomenally great preacher has recognized 
both this fact in his audience and its counterpart in 
the Scriptures, namely, that they consist of doctrines 
in one form and another, and hence if a man preach 
the Bible he must preach doctrine. It is idle to point 
out to the contrary the crowds of a great city which 
flock to hear some mere rhetorical phenomenon. You 
may find big crowds at the circus also, but it does 
not take many circuses to go round. A great many 
more people, boys and girls, men and women, go to 
schools than to circuses, and a great deal oftener. 
We naturally place entertainment second to instruc- 
tion. Most hearers wish gospel truth when they go 
to church. They relish discourses on God, sin, re- 
demption, repentance, faith, prayer, heaven; and, if 
presented with solemnity and tenderness, will not 
refuse instruction on perdition itself. There are some 
unpreachable things, which are nevertheless true and 
important. For example, the interior relations of the 
persons of the Godhead to each other, the divine 
method of creation, the method and philosophy of 
imputation, the reprobation of sinners. Such things 
are essential parts of the system of doctrine. But a 
good preaching instinct will leave them out of the 
pulpit, except as they enter by way of reference and 
illustration. A man does not need to dig up the 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 31 

foundations of his house and pull out the studding, 
to place his property on the market. If he does this 
sort of thing, nobody will buy, and it is just about 
that way with what may be styled excessive doctrinal 
preaching. 

If you do not preach doctrine, it becomes a serious 
question as to what you will find worth saying. All 
practical Christianity is built on doctrine. The ex- 
perience of both sinners and saints is along the line 
of doctrine. The being of God is a doctrine. Fallen 
man is a doctrine; man redeemed is a doctrine. The 
person of Christ and His work and its methods of 
application are doctrines. The span of life and the 
temporary inheritance of the world are doctrines. So 
are death and the judgment. Heaven is a doctrine. 
Hell is a doctrine. The realities, the hopes, the fears 
of this world, and the world to come, come to us in 
the Scriptures as doctrinal revelations. If you do not 
preach these things, what business have you in the 
pulpit? Think of Paul not preaching doctrine! He 
moves all along the line of truth. Peter overflows 
with even the unique things of God. John himself 
is in strictest sense a doctrinal preacher. The love of 
God and the love of man to God and man flow along 
the profound channels cut by such doctrines as the 
decrees, the incarnation, the atonement, and the mys- 
tical body of Christ. John M. Mason went to England 
and shook the island with his sermon on " Messiah's 
Throne." A Methodist bishop comes to Pittsburgh to 
dedicate one of the chief churches of his denomina- 
tion, and preaches upon the evidences of Christianity. 
You cannot do better than imitate these illustrious ex- 



32 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

amples. If you do not, you will grow intellectually 
and spiritually weak, and your parishioners as lean 
as Pharaoh's kine, and your place and theirs be se- 
cured to you in the Church of God by the radiated 
influence of the better ministry of more faithful men. 
It is a shaggy sort of comparison, but certain minis- 
ters and congregations are like polar bears — they live 
on the fat they accumulated in other and younger 



How should you go about the kind of ministry 
recommended 1 Simply by following out biblical lines 
of teaching. "Doctrine" means " teaching. " Your 
primary business as preachers is to be teachers of 
truth. You are not so much to make a multitude of 
applications of truth in your sermons, as to announce 
and expound the truth itself. The Holy Ghost and 
the practical sense of your hearers will make the ap- 
plications which so-called "practical preaching" in- 
sists on making in the sermon. The man, for example, 
who is perpetually dragging "the times" into his 
pulpit, will often succeed better in getting the world 
into his sermons than the gospel. 

Nor is it necessary, on the other hand, to array 
formal theology, with its refinements and philosophic 
connections, essential though these be to a coherent 
system, and latent in the Bible itself, in the sermon. 
A discourse does not need to show the reasonableness 
of intuitional philosophy, to make successful appeal 
to the intuitions of the audience. The sermon is not 
to wear, like the strawberry, its bones on the outside. 
And yet a preacher without right philosophic con- 
nections cannot be an intelligent expounder of the 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 33 

full width of biblical truth. The whole difference 
between Calvinism, Arminianism, Socinianism is one 
of philosophy. Calvinism is simply the correct inter- 
pretation of the Pauline philosophy. Every heresy, 
even, is a philosophy at bottom. The preacher must 
have his philosophical foundations and links of con- 
nection clearly established, or his preaching will be 
a sand heap, each particular grain unrelated to every 
other, except by neighborhood. 

However, a preacher is not to call the roll of his 
theological positions in his sermons, and have every 
particular member vocally signify its presence to his 
audience. Roll calls are seldom particularly interest- 
ing or edifying. The preacher is building a structure 
in the hearing of his congregation. He will not get 
them back very often, if he insists on thumbing his 
commentaries and lexicons and theologies in their 
presence. The sermon is results, and not methods. 
It is fruit, and not the tree on which the fruit grew. 
A man builds a house, and the sawmill, brick-kiln, 
iron foundry, paint shop, carpet loom, all contribute 
to make it habitable ; yet he does not think it wise to 
erect on the premises the sawmill, iron foundry, 
carpet factory to obtain the house. He is content to 
use their product. So is the sermon. You are to 
remember the difference between a workshop and a 
pulpit, and to offer in the one the finished results of 
toil in the other. Once a transient preacher in this 
very pulpit discoursed on that high theme, the Trin- 
ity, and lugged in so much refinement of philosophy 
as to turn the house into a sort of ice cave, and take 
the glow out of the hearts of the worshipers with 



34 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

chills down their backs. I have heard a sermon on 
the atonement which discussed the moral influence 
theory, the governmental theory, and the satisfaction 
theory for an hour, with the steady pace of a game of 
checkers, and wound up the process of demolishing 
heresy by triumphantly getting the truth into the king 
row! People called those doctrinal sermons. Not so. 
They were simply blunders. 

And now, dear friends, the seminary sends you out 
sufficiently indoctrinated in the truth, as we think, to 
preach with correctness the great things of salvation. 
We have confidence that your sermons will be the 
substance of the Word of God. Because you will 
preach His Word, we expect to hear of the Master's 
blessing upon your labors. To this end we have 
taught and have sought the heavenly blessing upon 
you; and, cherishing pleasant memories of your resi- 
dence with us, we commend you to God and to the 
word of His grace, that you may be able ministers of 
the New Covenant. 



SELF-RESPECT 

Dear Brethren of the Class op 1896: 

Self-respect is an almost fundamental virtue, par- 
ticularly in the Christian minister. Robert Hall once 
advised that no man should ask anybody's pardon for 
having been born. Paul made an application of the 
same sentiment to a young minister, Timothy, when 
he said, "Let no man despise thy youth." It is some- 
times said by people who do not know the hearts of 
young ministers, that self-confidence, even bumptious- 
ness, rather than modesty, is their characteristic. It 
is rarely correct. Many heart failures, apologies, re- 
fusals to undertake certain sorts of work, and con- 
tentment with obscurity and accepted inferiority, are 
traceable to a modesty which is more nearly akin to 
sin than to virtue. We have heard so much about 
the grace of humility, we sometimes think it consists 
in eating humble pie and hiding ourselves in the cor- 
ners. Yet where one young minister offends by being 
too bold, ten hamper themselves by shrinking from 
difficult duty. They do not possess enough self-respect 
to properly credit their powers. One of the notice- 
able things in human life is that the men who occupy 
stations and have their hands on the longest levers in 
Church and State are not always gifted with remark- 
able brain power. Very often they are only middling 
people; but they are not troubled with morbid self- 
35 



36 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

consciousness, and are willing to try their hands. In 
view of this condition of things permit the illustra- 
tion, in three or four points, of this matter of self- 
respect as it relates to yourselves. May the lesson 
go with you to India and Egypt and the parishes in 
America. 

I. — Self-respect as scholars. You begin your pub- 
lic life in a scholarly profession, with a more or less 
scholarly reputation, and with work lying before you 
which requires the grasp of scholars. What are you 
going to do about it? Abandon scholarly habits and 
trust to what you have gained? That will not take 
long to run you into bankruptcy. The sermon- 
maker's history is illustrated in the manna which 
came day by day. All the week Israel had no such 
stock on hand that they did not need to gather every 
day, except upon the Sabbath. Just so with the man 
who feeds the heavenly manna on the Sabbath to the 
section of Israel under his care. He must gather 
through the week or the Sabbath will be a hungry 
day. It is only by daily work he will be able to feed 
the flock and to have the pleasant consciousness of 
intellectual worth and wealth. Patient culture brings 
a sense of power and competence to handle even diffi- 
cult subjects. He will know that he knows, and will 
deliver himself in the knowledge that he has spoken 
the truth, and is entitled to have his words accepted. 
The minister should reach the place where he is an 
intellectual authority unto himself, where no man's 
ipse dixit "goes" with him, where he sits in decision 
upon the value of thought pertaining to his calling, 
winnowing, almost without effort, the chaff from the 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 37 

wheat. A preacher may be emancipated from tutors 
and governors, if he will, and become a master. This 
is normal development. After the acorn, the sapling 
and the oak. After the boy, the man. After the boy 
on the form, the teacher of others, studious, self- 
reliant, and an authority in his sphere. You must 
learn to respect your own minds, use your own tools, 
make your own combinations of thought, and honor 
your own findings. This will not be egotism, but self- 
respecting scholarship. Even a great name or a great 
creed are not outside the pale of your examination 
and criticism. 

A prime agency to such scholarship is a library of 
muscle and marrow and brains. A frothy ocean of 
books is being deluged upon the public, and it is 
possible for a minister to be either mentally drowned 
by it, or, what is about the same thing, become as 
frothy and unsubstantial as they. The fact that a 
volume is religious does not make it good reading. 
Many of the books in question bear the same relation- 
ship to true learning that campaign documents do 
to statesmanship, or the historical novel to history. 
A minister cannot long truly feed his mind on Pelou- 
bet's notes, sermons by the Monday club, homiletic 
commentaries, books of sermon skeletons, Parker's 
People's Bible, Talmage's or even Maclaren's ser- 
mons, cyclopedias of illustrations, volumes of Bible 
readings, and collections of addresses made at sum- 
mer schools. Some of these are better than others, 
but the general class should cut no figure in a clerical 
library. They have not much stuff in them, and what 
they have is not thorough and sometimes unwhole- 



38 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

some. Their method induces the nibbling, sandwich- 
ing habit of study in their readers, than which there 
is nothing worse. 

There is another class of books having merit and 
a sphere of usefulness, which may be overprized by 
the young minister. It is represented by Frances 
Ridley Havergal, F. B. Meyer, J. R. McDuff, Andrew 
Murray, and Pep loe- Webb. They should be on every 
minister's table, but too much use of them leads to a 
morbid mysticism, an introspective life, and away 
from the great historical Christ Who wrought out 
our salvation, and away from the great objective doc- 
trines which must chiefly be preached to men. Salva- 
tion as a scheme lying outside of a man must be 
somewhat understood by our hearers before we can 
preach salvation as an experience. 

Then there are the little books the current evangel- 
ists feel they must print, and their periodicals. These 
offer many wise suggestions as to methods of work, 
and they have their lessons for ministers. But not 
a single solid volume, one of any considerable intel- 
lectual usefulness, has come from their hands. They 
are not blameworthy for it. But that they shall be 
taken into one's library as teachers of doctrine, who 
have rarely looked into a volume of theology; or to 
teach interpretation of the Scriptures, who know abso- 
lutely nothing of the vast study the Church has put 
upon God's Word; or even to teach how to preach, 
who sometimes have made but a few score of sermons, 
and almost never above two hundred or three hun- 
dred; or that they be allowed to indoctrinate Church 
teachers with vague and dreamy notions about such 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 39 

subjects as the advent and the millennium, who have 
scarcely a tithe of the comprehensive Biblical knowl- 
edge of the great minds who framed the creeds to 
the contrary — all this is not only anomalous and un- 
wise, but intellectually and spiritually unsafe. The 
lessons of the teacher mould the taught. 

As young men you probably think there is much in 
summer schools, and institutes, and conventions. They 
are important agencies in the Church for the instruc- 
tion of certain classes, and they may afford you some 
slight help and a pleasant variety in your vacation; 
but really they are not of very great advantage to an 
educated ministry. Your going off to ill-equipped, 
and often ill-balanced and superficial, institutes, is to 
be deprecated rather than encouraged. You will far 
better obtain your learning by hard work in your 
own library at home. That is the place where the 
man is made. Such schools and conventions as men- 
tioned keep you leaning on instructors when you 
should be walking alone, introduce you to fanciful 
and almost vicious methods of Bible work, fill you up 
with chaff and theories of work almost as light as 
chaff, and run you into little narrow ruts of thought 
and method which tend to make you small men. You 
will never learn your Bibles by marking them up 
with blue and red lead pencils. These Bible insti- 
tutes have their place, but they are not adapted to 
such as you. You have already outgrown all sorts 
of knee pants, roundabouts, and Windsor ties. Do 
not in anything go back to them. A serious danger 
of our younger ministry lies in this direction. 

II. — You are to respect yourselves as pastors. But 



40 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

egotism is not self-respect. Nor is a feeling of per- 
sonal • pride in your office, a sense of the local im- 
portance with which it invests you, self-respect. The 
virtue so named consists in just appreciation of your 
character and attainments, and of the sacred dignity 
of the office the Head of the Church has placed upon 
you. You w T ill each receive consideration from all 
good and really cultured people of your community, 
if you rightly consider yourself and are deserv- 
ing. But you must not be a boor; instead, a simple- 
mannered, unartificial, pleasant, courteous gentleman. 
Brusqueness is not a talent. In business you must 
not be mean. Discounts are not the chief end of a 
minister. You must not be a monopolist of conver- 
sation, and a hungry seeker of the good places for 
which your neighbors and parishioners are also can- 
didates. You must not presume on your cloth. Your 
office will be an offense unless the man is acceptable. 
The minister who is not given to looking out for him- 
self will generally find others are looking out for him. 
Pay your own fare and bear your part in the ex- 
penses of an occasion. You must not be a shallow 
pate, a man of empty judgment, nor one insisting 
your judgment shall be allowed. Do not be a man of 
small knowledge and personally the superior of no- 
body. You will naturally have a rank. Maintain it 
by deserving it. 

Many a preacher falls in his own estimation from 
the lack of what he might readily possess : for exam- 
ple, good manners, polite ease, neat clothing, a well- 
informed mind, good preaching power, and an at- 
tractive, efficient wife, which pastoral qualification 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 41 

goes far toward giving liim good standing. She is 
not beyond the reach of your lawful, well-regulated 
ambition, and, after due process of visitation, may 
often be had for the asking. 

Some ministers of great natural worth grow ex- 
ceedingly modest, because they are located in com- 
paratively unimportant parishes. Let it not be so 
with you. Do not shrink to the size of your work 
and come to feel incompetent for larger or different 
things. Do not think your rights are infringed upon 
by your more prominent brethren. If you do, you 
will probably not have asserted yourselves and mani- 
fested the good qualities you possess. L T nless you dis- 
play your worth fittingly you may expect to drop 
back. Make your own place and fill it. 

Sometimes the pastor finds requisitions made upon 
him "not nominated in the bond." Not infrequently 
he is required to keep quiet on intemperance and the 
liquor traffic, just as he was on slavery. Now a hobby 
rider is not a graceful equestrian; yet we sometimes 
become addicted to that exercise on so good amount 
as temperance. But that is a small matter compared 
with yielding to pressure to keep quiet, or to say 
harmless things on the giant sin of our civilization. 
Neither the Lord nor the people have use for such 
dumb oracles. Sometimes the local political ring will 
put a ring in your nose, if you submit to the opera- 
tion. The sooner and more decidedly its demands are 
courteously refused, the better for you. Do not let a 
parishioner or a local magnate control your pulpit 
or make your ballot for you. One case of attempted 
domination of the pastor ran thus: a considerable 



42 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

civil office was in danger of being lost to the party 
strongest in a large congregation. The pastor was 
known to prefer the man certain influential parishion- 
ers did not. One day a " whipper-in " called on him 
and said: "If you vote for so-and-so, certain persons 
in the congregation, who are your friends, will not 
like it. You ought to vote for the other man." Said 
the pastor, somewhat bluntly: "You can say to those 
who sent you that I am a free citizen and will vote 
for whom I please, and they can do the same. As a 
citizen I propose to mind my own business, and I 
will be much pleased if they will mind theirs." He 
had no more trouble, and, of course, lost no friends. 
A preacher can afford to be a man. 

III. — Did it ever strike you that even a denomina- 
tion can be too little self -respectful ? If not, please 
look at our own in the light of two or three illustra- 
tions. We are constantly mentioning the fact that 
we are small compared with others; just as if it is 
always a defect to be small, and as if there were no 
room to grow. Size does not determine worth. The 
great length of a sermon, as your parishioners will 
probably tell you, is not the measure of its efficiency. 
The larger denominations are not proportionately use- 
ful. Goliath's bigness did not make him a better man 
than little David, who became a Psalm-singer. Our 
business is not to apologize for being small, but to 
seek to grow to the best limit of health and power. 

It is not self -respectful to be perpetually apologiz- 
ing for our Psalms in one way and another. Some 
one has participated in a union meeting where Psalms 
were sung. Of course everybody was delighted, in 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 43 

case they were sung well. Straightway is sent to the 
papers a report of the flattering remarks which cer- 
tain hymn-singers had made about these songs to 
which they had been strangers. "What melody! 
What a spirit of grace in them! We are amazed at 
the music they make! We do not wonder at your 
Church for singing them!" Such things are written 
to the papers as a sort of credentials for the Psalter. 
They are used to give character to our Church posi- 
tion on praise, are regarded as a sort of unexpected 
encouragement to continue in their use. The writers 
do not seem to see they are not so much aiding God's 
hymn-book to a proper recognition of its deserts, as 
giving currency and prominence to the fact that it 
has been and is extensively disparaged. For myself, 
I always feel little under these patronizing encomiums 
which are the utterance of the passing moment, and 
really mean nothing for the book we love. 

Then there are revivals where the Psalms are found 
effective. The fact is not omitted in the reports. We 
hear about their remarkable adaptation to revivals. 
You know the story. It inevitably conveys the im- 
pression that there was somewhere a doubt about their 
adaptation; their efficiency was felt to be a question, 
and their use at such times something of an adventure. 
Of course this is not in the reporter's mind, yet the 
impression is conveyed. The discovery of the remark- 
able spiritual adaptedness of the Psalter in this new 
field is no astonishment to those who know it best. 
However, it incidentally comes into prominence by the 
use of our new methods of evangelism. But, after all, 
there is no need of laying a half -apologetic stress on 



44 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

it in published reports. It is nothing new that good 
gospel preaching and devout Psalm-singing have com- 
mingled in great revivals. You never hear hymn- 
singers justifying hymns in a revival. They assume 
their worth. Let us learn a lesson from them. The 
Psalter being God's manual of praise is adapted to 
every need of the Church, whether it be the con- 
version of sinners, the burial of saints, or the coming 
of the Lord amid the throes of nature. There is a 
certain denominational self-respect possible, desirable, 
which will make us exceedingly sensitive to every- 
thing looking even inferentially toward our disparage- 
ment, and will safeguard alike our doctrines and our 
dignity. 

You have had many counsels from your instructors 
as to personal piety, pastoral methods, and the great 
doctrines of the faith. These we trust you will re- 
member. But as you go from us, we add this one 
concerning ministerial self-respect. It is not the least 
important, whether you go to the foreign field or 
abide at home. Its roots are in good character, in 
fellowship with God, in faithfulness to the faith, in 
loyalty to duty, in efficiency in the Lord's service. If 
you are not self -respectful, you will be ciphers even in 
the eyes of the heathen. But as men of personal 
worth, and bearing an office received from the King 
and Head of the Church, and used by the Holy 
Spirit to accomplish a mission of salvation, you can 
fearlessly stand before kings. May you never have 
cause to be ashamed of yourselves on account of your 
secret life or your lack of scholarly competence to 
effectively preach the gospel, and lead the hosts of 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 45 

the Lord to victory anywhere on His footstool; and 
may He crown you and your work with success and 
honor. 

We now have the pleasure of placing in your hands 
the diploma of the Seminary, certifying- to your 
scholarship, and commending you to the churches. 



THE MINISTER UNDER ORDERS 

Dear Brethren of the Class of 1897 : 

The burden of our counsel to you as you go out 
to bear the part of ministers of the gospel is in the 
commission given to the prophet Jonah: "Arise, go 
unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the 
preaching that I bid thee"; and in that given to 
Jeremiah: "Thou shalt go to all that I shall send 
thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt 
speak"; and again in that given to the apostles, and 
which you inherit: "Go ye into all the world and 
preach the gospel to every creature." All these com- 
missions announced a fourfold thought to those to 
whom they came, and may also to you, under the gen- 
eral theme, "The Minister under Orders." I trust 
you will be profited by a personal application. 

I. — You have orders for your work. It is a great 
thing to be under orders in such a work ; to know you 
do not run without an errand. Ahimaaz extracted 
permission to run from Joab's army to the king, and 
in his feverish haste he overran Cushi; but he had 
no tidings when he reached the gate. He ran unsent. 
When the slower black man came, he was found 
charged with a message from his commander, and his 
running was of value. The minister who carries the 
gospel to the nations does it under orders. He is not 
an adventurer. His imaginations and sympathies 
46 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 47 

have not incited his errand. He is not a Buddha, or 
a Mohammed, or a Mormon prophet. He does not 
run unsent. He is a commissioned messenger, a herald 
of an authority greater than himself, a ' ' voice crying 
in the wilderness." And not only is he to know this, 
but to extract from it the element of power it con- 
tains. This lies in the thought that there is a higher 
wisdom in his ministry than his own. There is a 
plan which outreaches his best devisings, is not de- 
feated by his defects, and which looks toward an end 
not determined by his power. There is, therefore, a 
responsibility for success which overtops his own. The 
common soldier may sleep to-night, for the battle to- 
morrow is to be chiefly in the hands of his general, 
while he will be only a private under orders. One of 
the most energizing and comforting considerations in 
our ministry is that we work under a plan not our 
own, in a field not our own, by appointments and 
agencies not our own, for an end we could never have 
devised; and we live in a scheme of providence and 
grace where, as minor factors, we are in the hands of 
the all- wise power we call God, Who, through us, 
applies salvation to men. 

II. — Your orders are from the Lord. They are 
from the Church only as His lieutenant. The Church 
did not originate your mission, but the Church 's King 
and Head. ' ' He gave some apostles, and some proph- 
ets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and teach- 
ers." To all such come His commands to proclaim 
His will to our race, whose primary obligations are to 
God. Thus you go merely as God's messengers, and 
your only credentials are those of Isaiah: "the Lord 



48 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

God and His Spirit hath sent me." You need not 
offer any other. You will have no other to offer. The 
world will not accept you with any other. Under 
recognition of such a commission even Balaam could 
not but deliver his message without abatement and 
with confidence. How much more should the minister 
of Christ stand with boldness, even before kings! 
His lips may always announce a "thus saith the 
Lord," and about the authority of such words there 
can be no argument. It was a bit of foolish and 
amusing buncombe when Ethan Allen, deist, and co- 
lonial officer, demanded the surrender of Ticonderoga 
in "the name of the great Jehovah and the Conti- 
nental Congress," a sort of blank cartridge in such 
lips, and particularly as the garrison was only fifty 
men, of whom forty-nine were fast asleep. We smile 
at the military bombast. But what sweetness, and 
fitness, and majesty about the gospel minister's enun- 
ciation of his authority: "now then, we are ambas- 
sadors for Christ as though God did beseech you by 
us, we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to 
God. ' ' You represent a Saviour Who ' lived, and was 
dead, and, behold, He is alive forevermore, and has 
the keys of hell and of death." Brethren, there is 
power in the source of your authority. It forbids 
all cringing and truckling and apology. Fortunes, 
and commonwealths, and thrones, and organized sin, 
and men who all come into judgment, must stand in 
awe of your Master, and they should do reverence to 
your office and message; and they will, in less or 
greater degree, if the messenger does not obscure his 
Lord and his commission. When, therefore, you min- 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 49 

ister, remember that you are not only under orders, 
but that they are from God, and that He will see to 
it that you run not in vain, neither labor in vain. 

III. — Your orders send you to men on spiritual 
errands. Men are to be sought as hearers. If there 
is no call for you at Nineveh, there is at some other 
place in "all the world." Wherever you go you are 
to deal directly with men as immortal. You will find 
them everywhere, laboring* and heavy laden. You 
are not scientists, or inventors, or artisans, useful men 
all. You are simply messengers to utter what has 
been put into your lips. You will cry, "Seek ye 
first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, ' ' and 
declare : " in my Father 's house are many mansions. ' ' 
You deal with souls, and are sent for the cure of 
souls. This will generally shut you out of business, 
out of the workshop, out of the fields you may chance 
to own, out of the political arena. May it be your 
good fortune to get soundly whipped if you seriously 
enter the political field as candidates. And it is com- 
forting to know you probably will. You will be urged 
to participation in the secularities. Occasional con- 
ditions will justify partial or entire retirement from 
the ministry; but nothing will justify the seculariza- 
tion of your pulpits. One adviser counseled that the 
country preacher discourse on the best kinds of wheat, 
the most satisfactory breeds of sheep, and the newest 
valuable farm machinery. Some counsel town and 
city pastors to dabble considerably in current munic- 
ipal problems. But jnst try such things, brethren, 
and you will discover that people wish and will hear 
nothing permanently from the pulpit but the gospel. 



50 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

Even if the minister sometimes forgets his mission, 
his people rarely do, although they may forget his 
message. What you preach will conduce to good 
bodily health, but that is not its prime intent. It is 
not chiefly meant to develop capacity for seizing the 
riches of nature, though this is a resultant. It is not 
aimed at the state or nation, though they are bettered 
by the gospel. A few preachers, with rare and amus- 
ing egotism, fancy themselves bearing a sort of apos- 
tolic commission to their entire city, and seek to make 
their pulpits centers of even national influence. But 
certainly most men are sent to individual souls, to 
small communities needing salvation from the pen- 
alties of sin, introduction to a new life, and the bless- 
ings flowing directly from reconciliation with God. 
The one chief thing given you to do is to save men 
by your gospel message. If you do this the civiliza- 
tion and the secularities will be saved as well. 

IV. — Your orders fix and limit your message. 
Preach unto Nineveh " the preaching I bid thee." 
This seems to be the iron bedstead of Procrustes, 
hurting the joints, the cross of a veritable crucifixion 
to a class of ministers and congregations. So we have 
preludes on matters pertaining to the world, the flesh, 
and the devil, which make the little bit of the gospel 
which gets into the sermon flat and insipid. We have 
stereopticon shows, magnoscope effects, illuminated 
lectures on the Holy Land, pictured discourses on the 
" Pilgrim's Progress," the dear pastor's travels, in- 
cluding his bills of fare, exposes of this and that, trav- 
eling humbugs who ' ' take in ' ' the pastors and the col- 
lections, and other vapid, profane, and wholly unfit 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 51 

material creeping from time to time into the place of 
the gospel message. Many current pnlpit notices dis- 
close the same fact, as for example, " The Speckled 
Bird, " " The Mother-in-Law, ' ' which is warranted to 
bring out the youngsters and keep them in a giggle, 
1 ' Beelzebub Driving His Hogs to be Drowned, " " De- 
formed Feet," " An Apostle's Lost Baggage," " The 
Strange Contents of a Lost Trunk," "Upa Tree." 
Such topics warrant Tholuck's sarcasm of the Ger- 
mans. Said he : " Our ministers have rid their sermons 
of doctrine and are preaching on the necessity of tak- 
ing regular exercise. ' ' All such stuff is almost wholly 
aside from the divine message. God has no part in 
such intellectual and spiritual vacuity, such mounte- 
banking and tomfoolery. The sermon is not a joke, 
nor the preacher a showman. The pulpit is neither a 
lecture platform, a circus ring, nor a mere place to 
put in the time. It is the place for the proclamation 
of the twofold message, salvation coming from God, 
and duty returning to God. Pulpit departures from 
these fundamentals are beyond the stretch of apology, 
are trifling with the office of prophet, and are not to 
be disguised as to their true character — they are sins. 
Think of a pulpit criticism of "Hamlet" when men 
are needing food for their souls; or an essay on the 
theology of Browning when the sum of all theology is 
at hand in the Bible; or a discourse on the mud and 
filth of Whitman and Swinburne, when the multitudes 
are crying for some one to pull them out of the Slough 
of Despond. Evangelist did it for the floundering 
Pilgrim, and the preacher of the evangel must do it 
still. Nor is it so very much better to spend the 



52 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

pulpit hour discoursing on the great characters of 
the Reformation Church. Calvin, and Knox, and 
Wesley are magnificent figures, but their biographies 
were never intended to be the preacher 's message. 

It is limited to the Bible, and is wholly concerning 
two things — the law of God and the gospel of His 
Son. Beyond the exposition and illustration and just 
application of these things no preacher is authorized 
to go. This will allow the rebuttal of both doctrinal 
and practical heresy, but calls chiefly for the display 
of the Bible's contents. The thought to be impressed 
is simply that God has given the substance of preach- 
ing in His Book. Sermons said to be suitable for the 
times are false pretensions, except they set the Book 
in relation to the needs of men. Sermons that discuss 
the floating issues and gossip of the day, that hungrily 
seize on the revival of the Greek games, or the petty 
skirmishings in Cuba, or the ambitions of " Queen 
Lil," or the opening of the football season, and such 
like intellectual and moral vacuities are wholly devoid 
of both the law and the gospel. They allow the 
speaker to say clever things, and tickle the ears of a 
lot of people who practically stipulate that their con- 
science be let alone ; but they convey no message from 
God. Balaam did better. The biind lead the blind, 
and the ditch is not far off. 

There is another danger to your ministry, and one 
that young men particularly need to avoid. It is the 
tendency to cast pulpit work into formal theological 
mould. You are familiar with the moulds, but please 
remember they are the property of the Seminary. 
You have no business with them. You and we have 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 53 

different audiences, and what has profited you will 
make your sermons hard, dry, and uninteresting. No 
ordinary audience can long endure discourses present- 
ing " first" and "second justification, ' ' "concursus 
simultaneous and immediate," the question of the 
power of "contrary choice," etc. All these things 
will come into good preaching, but will not come 
labelled and branded with technicalities. The doctor 
prescribes that good and strong and old remedy, 
"Hydrargyrum cum creta et opii," but he is content 
if the patient takes the medicine according to Eng- 
lish directions, and does not insist he shall swallow the 
Latin prescription. Be as wise as the physician ; yet 
try to do a little better in transferring your theo- 
logical thought into good English terms than did an 
embarrassed brother, who in a strange pulpit began 
a discourse on justification by faith as follows: "Dear 
brethren, for to be in a justified state is a good state 
for to be in. ' ' This was at least luminously true, and 
was followed by no prosecution for heresy. 

There is a divine reason for the theology of the 
Bible not being in treatises, — bookish. It is meant for 
the masses of men, who can gather food from the 
piecemeal, concrete, and living forms of the Book, but 
would find only flinty rock if it were crystallized into 
formal and articulated theology. A minister should 
be a theologian in his study only, and only a preacher 
in his pulpit. Yet do not, I beg of you, take up the 
Ritschlian, rationalistic, vacant-minded cry against 
systematized theology. You are not to be intellectual 
vagrants and irresponsibles. The vacation of this 
study means all sorts of resulting crudity, and vagary, 



54 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

and incoherency in religious teaching. But please do 
not bring your workshop into the pulpit. The car 
that carries the passengers does not load down with 
dynamos, and buzz-saws, and jack-screws. They be- 
long elsewhere. 

There is also the greatest need that you do not 
preach yourselves. Subjectivism is a vast danger to 
the pulpit. A preacher is not a silkworm, that spins 
what is valuable about it out of itself. The substance 
of preaching lies outside ourselves. The Christ of 
the Cross is chiefly to be proclaimed, and not the 
Christ formed within us the hope of glory. The pulpit 
is to proclaim God, His providence, His covenant with 
His Son, His salvation, His law, the second coming, 
the judgment, and, beyond all, an eternal destiny. 
Growing out of the covenant of redemption is a 
scheme of doctrine of instruction, designed to promote 
the better life of men. Preaching is to move within 
this gracious cyclopedia. Outside it we are mere secu- 
larists or subjectionists. Neither of them preach the 
preaching that is bidden, even though the latter takes 
the very plausible form of our religious experience. 

There are two types of subjectivism afflicting the 
pulpit. Perhaps I would better say, infesting the 
pulpit and afflicting the congregations. One is the ra- 
tionalism which brings the Bible itself to the test 
of the thought and feelings of the preacher. Without 
meaning it, he sits in judgment upon his God. If the 
Book does not square with his judgments, his preju- 
dices, he casts out, whether it be the doctrine of 
eternal perdition or the Mosaic authorship of the 
Pentateuch. He determines the precise extent of in- 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 55 

spiration, and colors to his suiting his findings in 
both law and gospel. I trust none of you will join 
this class of preachers, and thus set yourselves above 
the Book, and render nugatory the divine revelation. 
A first requisite to a useful minister is that he be 
absolutely submissive to the Word of God. 

The other type of subjectivism in the pulpit is the 
mystical. It runs along the line of the feelings, the 
experiences. It never questions the Bible, but merely 
drops it out by telling about itself. It preaches itself, 
and not always Christ Jesus the Lord. It emphasizes, 
magnifies results to be attained by holding on to the 
one Great Head. It tells truth, but not so much the 
truth as it is in Jesus as what it conceives to be the 
truth of Jesus in itself, in believers. It turns the 
eyes away from the Lord to behold the Lord's works 
in the soul. It looks not so much at Him as at His 
reflection. It deals in terms of ' ' consecration, " ' • holy 
living," " peace," " testimony bearing," " higher 
life," and the delightful experiences which come by 
faith in our Lord. It rarely gets far from the cluster 
of doctrines which bears directly upon joyful fellow- 
ship with the Saviour. Now, I do not wish to even 
seem to condemn this type of ministry entirely. I do 
not. It has an important value, and to a degree it has 
endorsement in Scripture. But what I do wish most 
earnestly to say is that preaching made up in the main 
of this type of work omits the greater part of what 
is bidden. It is intellectually weak. It makes the 
emotional nature perform all the functions of the 
spiritual man. It builds a Church that lives much 
on mere sensations, and is never satisfied unless it be 



56 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

in an electric tingle. Under such preaching your 
parish will not long have need of you. You build up 
nobody. You simply keep things warm until the fuel 
runs out. Said a shrewd old minister, speaking of a 
preacher of this type : ' ' He is wearing out in his field 
because he is always preaching about how he feels, 
and you feel, and everybody should feel. It's wholly 
a matter of feeling with him, and it has lost the charm 
of novelty. There is not much substance to his 
preaching. What he should do is preach Christ in 
the fulness of His person, and doctrine, and law." 
That critic was right. The surest way to exercise a 
useful ministry is to declare the whole counsel of God, 
with applications as may be required. 

And now we dismiss you to the service for which 
you are prepared. We do not bid you farewell, since 
we expect to be within eyeshot of each other upon 
the walls of Zion. Some of you will serve in the pas- 
torate of the established congregations. We are de- 
lighted to send you, for there the kingdom of Christ 
is to be maintained. Some of you will go into the 
mission field at home. We are glad to send you, for 
there the kingdom of Christ is to be established. 
Some of you go to the foreign field. We have much 
pleasure in sending you, for there the kingdom of 
Christ is to be set up. We are grateful we have had 
the privilege of educating you to go anywhere in the 
earth, since the uttermost part of it is given to our 
Lord for His possession. And our parting admonition 
to you is, wherever you go, hear this word of the 
Lord : ' ' Preach the preaching that I bid thee. ' ' 



THE USE OF GOOD SENSE IN THE 
MINISTRY 

Dear Brethren of the Class of 1898 : 

You have heard very much about the needs of the 
minister in certain great things fundamental to his 
work. Again and again has been emphasized the 
necessity of good sermonic methods, personal piety, 
careful intellectual culture, and the continual baptism 
of the Holy Ghost. Such matters are the staple, also, 
of most of our farewell addresses to outgoing classes. 
Having other thoughts in mind at this time, we trust 
it is enough to say to you upon these capital matters, 
that, without the qualifications they signify, your min- 
istry will be void of the power for which you hope 
and, we trust, earnestly pray. If any of you count 
such fundamentals small, and propose not to practice 
them, you would best abandon the ministry altogether 
here and now, and leave your diploma for a more con- 
secrated man. The Klondike or Cuba can put you to 
a better use than a congregation. Believing that you 
heartily accept the instructions heretofore offered 
upon these chief intellectual and spiritual requisites 
to your work, we wish to turn your attention to cer- 
tain other matters of less importance, and which are 
yet more or less essential to your ministerial useful- 
ness, even although they are often passed by. They 
57 



58 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

may be grouped under the caption: "The Use of 
Good Sense in the Ministry." 

Not one of you would not resent even a hint that 
you are not abundantly possessed of, and quite certain 
to exercise, this commonplace quality. We are willing 
to believe you are correct in your opinion; but the 
fact is, some ministers, who were and are just as con- 
fident of themselves, have shown a woful lack of this 
first essential to a useful man and a pastor. A man 
may be a genius in poetry, or music, or painting, or 
language, or figures, or public address, or many other 
things, and be devoid of good hard sense. Genius is 
often but another term for an ill-balanced mind. 
Painters, and poets, and lightning calculators may 
thrive without mental and moral equilibrium, but 
lawyers, and doctors, and business men, and preachers 
never can. In most cases, moreover, a poor balance 
has not even the compensation of resulting genius. 
Ordinary men, as well as extraordinary, may be lop- 
sided. Yet such a condition is by no means beyond 
control. Careful consideration of all the elements of 
his makeup, and of his ministerial province and his 
environment, may very well lead to wise behavior. 
A man does not need to follow his bent as he must 
his nose. He is not under compulsion to commit folly. 
The greatest of moral philosophers has said: "with 
all thy getting get wisdom." It may be gotten in 
every-day, external affairs as well as in spiritual. 
You are to get it if you have it not ; and if you have it, 
you are to be watchful to exercise it to the best limit. 

There are numerous examples of unwise clerical 
conduct, although by reason of several aggravations 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 59 

the men have often been in a way driven to it. A 
new pastor is said to have announced one morning 
after service that he supposed the congregation had an 
officer called the treasurer, but had no means of per- 
sonal knowledge, since, after eight months' work in 
the parish, he had not seen the color of his money. 
He would give him until the next Monday a week 
to make himself known and settle accounts, otherwise 
the pastor would resign. It was an aggravating situa- 
tion, to be sure, but that announcement was folly in 
Israel. It need scarcely be said the salary was paid, 
and that the resignation also came before long. The 
brother candidated for a while, and finally came to 
rest in the Presbyterian Church. It is usually dis- 
astrous to belabor a parish from the pulpit on debts 
owed upon salary. The wise way is not to allow 
congregations to get behind, and this can ordinarily 
be accomplished in a quieter manner. 

An itinerant was met on a Sabbath by a sleepy 
congregation. Suddenly he stopped and said: "I 
preached here twenty-five years ago, and the congre- 
gation was asleep. I see you have not waked up yet." 
It was a sharp cut, but it slew the sermon and the 
preacher's chances for acceptable service in that pul- 
pit. Wit in the pulpit at the expense of any self- 
respecting people is pretty sure to be resented. 
Plenty of smart, tartarish pulpit sayings are on rec- 
ord. They have a place in collections of ministerial 
anecdotes, and may have done well enough for Row- 
land Hill and John Wesley, owing to the men and 
their times, but they have no place in United Presby- 
terian pulpits. 



60 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

A preacher cannot afford to get into a "miff" to- 
ward any part of his parish or his work. He may 
have what he counts good reasons for his offishness; 
but he may be perfectly sure that in the long run 
nobody else will count them so, not even his friends. 
He is there to labor in all sections of his work, and 
to treat everybody kindly and courteously. The of- 
ficious and bossy elder may be a thorn in his flesh. 
The man who did not sign his call, and who does not 
like his preaching, may twist in his seat, and yawn in 
his face, and snap his watchcase at him, and say that 
he much prefers the noisy ministrations of Rev. Mr. 
Blunderbuss to the clear-cut, logical, scriptural, and 
well-delivered sermons of the pastor; but these are 
no reasons for frigidity when he meets the brother, 
or for making no pastoral calls at his house. Nor 
should he encourage his wife in like behavior. Ice 
does not melt in arctic temperature. The man who 
will freeze is the pastor, and he can surely count on 
being frozen out. 

Do not assume too much because you are the head 
of the parish. You have no right to dictate the 
amount to be put into the new church, or to abso- 
lutely determine its architecture, or to boss its details, 
or to interfere with the plans the building committee 
has adopted. You are not paying for that church. 
Occasionally you may be called to be the business 
man of the congregation, but this is rare. The pastor 
w T ho insists on being the ruling spirit in building a 
church will be wise if he keeps his eye open toward 
the vacant congregations. 

Sometimes a pastor becomes a partizan in a church 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 61 

quarrel. Keep your eyes open for the under-currents 
in your congregations and keep your mouth closed. 
"Dear Beaver, don't talk!" Feuds often exist, and 
by flattery, and courtesy, and various blandishments 
the pastor is drawn into undue sympathy. Keep your 
hand out of the fight personally, and keep the fight 
out of the Session. Commonly you can, if you will. 
Some cases must come into that court, but entirely 
too many get there. Judicial cases mean scandal, em- 
bitterment, and very frequently pastoral unsettle- 
ment. Sometimes pastors think it their duty, prop- 
erly enough, to expurgate the church of troublers and 
their troubling. They would count themselves moral 
cowards if they took no steps that way, and sometimes 
that view is correct. But good sense, dispassionate 
judgment is required to determine when that is the 
ease. As a rule, judicial process, and certainly the 
frequently resulting war in the parish, is a sore mis- 
take. A pastor who has cases enough in his Session 
to become familiar with "the book/' the law of dis- 
cipline, has need to question his policy. Personally, 
I recall but two judicial cases in my pastorates, and 
one was clearly a blunder. Your business, brethren, 
is not to rectify everybody by church law, but to 
preach that gospel which makes a good church pos- 
sible, and reduces church scandals and warfare to a 
minimum. If there is anything your good sense 
should keep you from becoming, it is a "church 
lawyer." 

Young gentlemen, do not pit yourselves against 
everything. In legislative bodies that sort of people 
is said to be "on the left." You may be on the left, 



62 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

and yet be in the right ; but left-handed people would 
commonly be better off if they were right-handed. 
Successful opposition can be accomplished by a 
smaller man than successful advocacy. There are 
many times when it is easier to say "no" than "yes." 
A minister may become a growler, and growl at his 
people, and in his presbytery, and at his denomina- 
tion, and his times. His fault-finding and pessimism 
may color all his work, and yet he never dream of it. 
There are many things the pastor is to antagonize, 
but he is not to develop the habit of opposition. The 
vast bulk of his ministrations is upon positive lines, 
and not negative. The color and popular impressions 
of your work are to be derived from a cheerful minis- 
tration of a joyful gospel, the glad tidings of great 
joy. Yours is not a ministry of negatives, of con- 
demnation, but of hope unto glory. It is a most woful 
thing when, through ill health, a soured mind, un- 
conscious habit, or sharp temptation, the minister be- 
comes largely condemnatory and critical of others in 
his addresses. His words are irritants to many minds, 
whether he speak in the pulpit or on the floor of the 
presbytery. His people say he is a fault-finder, and 
his presbytery, less elegantly, that he is a "kicker." 
Faithfulness in your ministry will not consist in 
pounding all and singly the mean things that come 
along. You will be ordained as something better than 
pugilists. A good pummeler of sins and sinners may 
make a very poor preacher of the gospel. You are to 
be found on the right side of true reforms and preach 
them ; yet your chief business is not to growl at exist- 
ing evils, but preach a gospel adapted to their removal. 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 63 

Good sense demands that a preacher be natural in 
the pulpit and out of it. The naturalness may be 
poverty-stricken enough, but it is riches compared 
with the artificialness and affections some preachers 
develop. Occasionally the relation of merit is re- 
versed, precisely as an old lady did it on being shown 
a bunch of Hermosa rose blooms: "Oh!" she cried, 
"how beautiful! They look just as natural as arti- 
ficials!" It takes much more than the artificialness 
of a white tie and an Oxford Bible under the arm 
when he walks down street to make a good preacher. 
It takes, first of all, a natural, sensible man. Un- 
naturalness shows itself in the pulpit tones, all the 
way from a whine to a bellow. We hear it in pro- 
nunciations, the "r's" are slurred, the vowels are 
trifled with, and there are a dozen tricks of speech not 
used outside the pulpit. We note it in the studied 
gesture, the cant of the eye, the pose of the body, the 
toss of the head, the air of "doing it," even in the 
dear little lisp that is best at home in the parlor. One 
acidulous critic, a woman, says such things show a 
soft spot in the preacher. I would that it were not 
in his head, but in his heart! The fact is, all such 
antics are inconsistent with the best sincerity in the 
preacher. They show too much thought about ex- 
ternals. 

The same mental temper may be shown in clerical 
manners. Lordliness ill becomes a preacher of the 
gospel. Mincing dignity, which walks about behold- 
ing itself in a looking-glass, looks but poorly as the 
herald of the lowly Nazarene. Self-assertion because 
of office and social grade is leagues away from a 



64 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

calling which demands meekness and gentleness. The 
opposite extreme is the affectation of great humility, 
and sweetness, and devoutness. It lays tribute on 
saccharine endearments of God and man, and is so 
humble in its phrase as to excite the fear that it may 
be slippery. In the city such an individual often 
excites reminiscences of "Miss Nancy," or of "Uriah 
Heep," and in the country they say "butter would 
not melt in his mouth." A man's real goodness and 
power may secure toleration for even these defects, 
but real defects they are, notwithstanding public tole- 
ration. 

There is another class of infringements upon good 
sense which limits usefulness. It concerns pecuniary 
transactions. A horse-trading parson may be strictly 
honest from his point of view, but he never can per- 
suade the man who gets the bad horse or his neigh- 
bors from their point of view. The clerical buggy 
may be drawn by a good animal with public approval, 
but current judgment forbids the clerical horse trade. 
The business is counted shady. There is a real danger 
here, and good judgment forbids trifling with it. 
The same may be said of debt which cannot readily 
be paid. Beware of such pecuniary debt as you would 
of malaria. It gives too many preachers chills and 
fevers. Paul meant just this when he said: "owe 
no man anything." You must live within your means. 
Other people are expected to do so, and you have 
secured no relaxing dispensation of the moral law. 
So also, avoid the dickering, jewing habit as one neces- 
sarily reducing you and your family in public esteem. 
If you wish the article at the price, take it. Ask for 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 65 

no discounts. If they are offered, you may accept 
them. But remember that merchants and others, who 
have things for sale, are entitled to their profit, and 
cannot do business without it. You have no right to 
ask them to waive their business rights on your behalf. 
Do not go on a parishioner's bond, or anyone's for 
that matter; and do not ask them to go on yours. 
Business entanglements are likely to arise which a 
business man is in position to handle, but a minister 
is not. His soul will become worried and secularized 
and his work dreadfully hampered. 

You have been doing some preaching here and 
there, and you are in position to notice some viola- 
tions of good taste in the pulpit to which ministers 
are somewhat prone. To violate good taste is to be 
heedless of good sense. It is not in good taste to gaze 
around on the congregation in a vacant or curious 
way before the services begin. You have no place in 
the pulpit until the hour has arrived. It is not a 
tower of observation. You are not called to sing so 
that everybody in the house can hear you. A very 
good minister once assisted me who delivered some 
of his notes as if he were shooting off a battery of 
field pieces, and between times kept up a roar like a 
big organ with the stops out. The choir at the other 
end of the church smiled, the congregation tittered, 
and when the singer put his mouth to the pastor's ear 
and whispered, loud enough to be heard in the pews, 
"I'm sorry I have a cold to-day and can't let myself 
out," it was almost beyond endurance. There may 
be an excess of vocal devotions. A new Methodist 
book on preaching says : " do not lounge on the pulpit 



66 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

sofa. Do not blow your nose as if it were a trumpet." 
The difference between Arminianism and Calvinism 
ought not to make any difference in pulpit manners. 
Do not ask every visiting preacher into your pulpit. 
He would rather not go. Do not pray for him spe- 
cially, and refer to his " great work," and all that. 
When your professors visit you, don't mention them 
in public devotions. What commandment gives you 
authority to dispense prayers by courtesy? You 
should not talk with a brother minister in the pulpit 
during the progress of the services. You would think 
conversation in the pews most improper. You are 
there to worship, not to retail to your brother the 
history of the bald-headed man, or to listen to the 
biography of the woman with the black-and-gray 
ostrich plumes in her bonnet. It is a great distrac- 
tion to the congregation and to yourself and the 
officiating minister for you to turn leaves of the 
Psalm-book for the next selection while prayer is 
being offered. You would not wish your choir to do 
it while you lead the devotions of the congregation. 
You should not rise to find the Scripture lesson dur- 
ing the singing of the Psalm. You should not close 
the Bible when you have read the text, and preach 
over a closed book. It takes away the air of divine 
authority from your message, and shows irreverence. 
Nor should you shut the volume with a resonant slap 
when the sermon is done. You should not become so 
modernized as to so fully dispense with the pulpit 
desk that none can be found for a visiting minister 
who is used to it. That is a most unministerial piece 
of discourtesy. If a man wants to read, give him a 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 67 

chance to read well. If he is nervous about standing 
out boldly on the platform, give him the desk as a 
sort of refuge. 

You should not wear an outlandish article of ap- 
parel anywhere. I have seen a good man in his pulpit 
in an old pair of carpet slippers. Another came as a 
candidate to a village church. He preached well on 
Sabbath, and on Monday went about town in a silk 
smoking cap, puffing a cigar. The congregation might 
have endured tobacco, but they would not have that 
cap. Think of the aesthetic incompatibility of a good 
sermon and a red necktie or a striped shirt! Do 
not hide your notes in case you need to use them. It 
is earnestly hoped, both by your professors and the 
congregations, that notes will not often be required. 
If they ever are, let there be no secrecy about their 
use. There is nothing in the Bible or the Book of 
Government against notes. The day ought long since 
to have passed when a man cannot take paper with 
him into any United Presbyterian pulpit without re- 
proach. There ought to be no cause for furtiveness 
at the time, or apology afterward. There are sermons 
which ought to be written and read, and most of the 
older men would be better preachers if they had felt 
at liberty to sometimes freely use their paper. There 
has been, and still is in some places, an unreasoning 
hostility to a manuscript, which has seriously crippled 
our ministry. If you find yourselves confronted by 
any serious occasional necessity, use your paper in 
a manly way, and give no excuse. You are to be 
the judges, and nobody else. On this point be not 
in bondage to any man. 



68 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

Time will not permit further counsel along these 
matter-of-fact lines. You will be enrolled in an hon- 
orable ministry, and one of the most efficient, I verily 
believe, that has ever served the Master. See to it 
that in intellectual industry, soundness in the faith, 
faithfulness in your pastoral labors, wholehearted de- 
votion to the Church and its great Head, clearness 
in discerning the needs of your times, and in the 
happy display of good sense, you do not fall behind 
the long roll of predecessors who have gone to their 
reward, and the fathers and brethren with whom you 
labor. Avoid their mistakes, emulate their virtues, 
and be the critic of no man but yourself. As David 
said to Solomon, so say your instructors to each of 
you: "now, my son, the Lord be with thee; and 
prosper thou, and build the house of the Lord thy 
God, as He hath said of thee. Only the Lord give 
thee wisdom and understanding, and give thee charge 
concerning Israel, that thou mayest keep the law of 
the Lord thy God." 



THE PASTORAL OFFICE 

Dear Brethren of the Class of 1899 : 

The terms ' ' pastor ' ' and ' ' preacher ' ' broadly dis- 
tinguish two phases of the minister's office. The first 
in order, though not in importance, is the pastoral 
function. Sometimes the preaching is so magnified 
as to make the pastoral labor see in small and of com- 
parative unimportance. This is like counting the 
head of the minister's body more vital than his heart. 
He will not do well without either; nor yet without 
both sermon and pastoral skill. In the main we will 
pass the sermon and offer a few familiar words on 
pastoral duty. If this requires a special justification, 
it is abundantly found in the quickening of pastoral 
endeavor, particularly in the cities, within a few years 
past. Whatever may be said of the public value of 
the sermon of the day compared with that of a half 
century ago, there can be no doubt the minister's 
labors outside the pulpit have acquired an importance 
not then known. Note, therefore, 

I. — The Pastor in the Parish 

The most patent remark here is that much of his 
work cannot be done according to time-honored meth- 
ods. The student has not lately heard of them in the 
seminary, but he has at home from parents who love 
69 



70 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

the past. Family tradition reports how the pastor 
came in state once a year, with an elder as a body- 
guard, or as one of themselves described it, "to open 
the gates and let down the bars." He catechised 
everybody who did not hide from him, delivered a 
formal exhortation, and went on to the next house- 
hold of trembling youngsters to repeat the operation. 
The biennial alternation of this in many rural par- 
ishes was the ' ' catechiz, ' ' or neighborhood meeting at 
an elder 's or some other central house, where the 
children assembled to shiver through an hour with 
the Westminster Assembly, and then to hop-skip-and- 
jump home in very secular glee that the ordeal was 
over. In most places such methods are no longer 
possible, and we do not need to shed tears over their 
departure. They were clumsily official, and do not 
suit our times, when less formal and more natural 
methods characterize the movements of society. Per- 
functory formal officialism nowadays is resented as 
almost wrongdoing. Your pastoral work must be 
chiefly with individuals and not with companies. 
Most converts under your ministry will be souls 
sought from God, solicited face to face and per- 
suaded. Special services, evangelists' labors, and 
other agencies may be found occasionally in place, but 
after all, in a very large sense, almost everything will 
depend on you, and you must magnify your pastoral 
office. 

You may need to learn many things by experience. 
Most young ministers have a lot of theories which 
must run to seed and die off before they work quite 
as they will later. They publish church papers which 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 71 

usually die happy and bankrupt within two years. 
They print bulletins for their small churches to save 
announcements, and then make a lot of announce- 
ments they could not get into the bulletin. They in- 
sist on calling on United Presbyterian women to lead 
in prayer in prayer-meeting, and wonder why so 
many of the faithful become irregular in attendance. 
One young fellow insisted that all his session of farm- 
ers should wear silk hats. Another insisted that his 
session do all the visiting of families, and was sur- 
prised when it was complained that he was not a good 
pastor. Yet another divided all his congregation into 
Sabbath school classes, and read the list from the pul- 
pit. This was his way of getting people into the Sab- 
bath school. Such novel ideas of doing his work soon 
led to his retirement from that pastorate, and without 
seeing the school a success. There may be several 
things it will take you some time to unload. Among 
others you must get rid of any notion that your pas- 
toral work will move well without a strong, warm in- 
fusion of your own personality. The pastor must be 
the actual working-head of his parish, even although 
he does not preside over the ladies' missionary soci- 
ety. And he must do abundant work in a plain, com- 
mon-sense, tactful way which will commend him to 
the well-balanced minds of the community. 

Should he be habitually absent from his Sabbath 
school? No. Should he teach a class? That depends 
on his strength, and whether the type of his parish or 
his helpers creates the necessity. Should he be fre- 
quently in the young people's meeting? He should; 
otherwise this important section of his parish will 



72 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

grow into independence of him, and, besides, it is not 
likely to grow very well. Should he always p reside 
at the prayer-meetings and make a set address ? Again 
it depends on his people. It is often the best thing 
he can do, although not ideal. Should he or his wife 
attend the congregational meetings? Not generally, 
unless he wishes to be counted a meddler, and is very 
desirous of hearing what can be said against him. 
Shall he insist it is his right to perform all the mar- 
riage ceremonies in his parish, and grow snappish be- 
cause he is not invited to do so ? Certainly not. There 
are uncles, and brothers, and cousins of the contract- 
ing parties, and their services are desired. Sometimes 
the old pastor will be honored by those who learned to 
love him before they knew you. You will have your 
turn when you get old, if you deserve it. 

One thing will impress you profoundly. It is that 
your work for a soul is not usually done by one 
sermon, though your best, or one visit, or one conver- 
sation. It is rather by the aggregate of your power 
to impress the gospel. There are many romantic and 
wonderful things in the annals of the pulpit and 
parish. We thrill over Livingstone's sermon at the 
Kirk of Shotts and five hundred conversions in an 
hour, and over Whitefield's bringing down hundreds 
of sinners at a stroke. These things are like thunder 
storms, normal but occasional. They will, perhaps, 
not come to any of you. Your work will be done by 
slow, patient, many-sided, aggregate effort. And let 
me tell you for your comfort, it is the best kind of 
work, and you will belong to the best kind of work- 
men. You will better be a lamp in the street than a 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 73 

meteor in the sky. Running to and fro in the earth 
is not the great means by which the knowledge of 
God is increased. One good missionary is worth two 
globe trotters. 

So far as he can be, the pastor should be a familiar 
friend in the home. In some cases it is almost im- 
possible. Shyness of clergymen, worldliness, wealth, 
station, and such like very often put barriers between 
the well-meaning pastor and members of his flock. 
Sometimes he is a lordly or unsympathetic fellow, who 
does not come to the heart level of his people. He 
needs some providential bayonet thrust to destroy his 
inflation, and some hammer of the Lord to break his 
heart, until he can feel with the humblest of his flock. 
And very likely his Master will send these things. 
The sorrowful thing will not be their coming, but that 
he ever needed them. Due clerical dignity is to be 
regarded, but it does not do pastoral work on stilts. 
And the average parishioner will not object to see a 
pastor so mounted take a headlong tumble, as he is 
pretty sure to do. Most dignity is artificial at any 
rate. It does not come from a superior humanity, but 
from being too well kept ; is a sort of stall-fed prod- 
uct. There are no fitting places for dress parade in the 
parish. The good pastor 's ambition is to be the friend 
of the parents, the well-beloved acquaintance of the 
children, and an ideal minister to the whole commu- 
nity. He will not forget that his social functions are 
to aid him in cultivating religion in all hearts. 

And yet he is not to become so familiar as to lose 
ministerial grade. He may know very many by the 
given name, but that should not lead him to crack 



74 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

jokes by the hatful, and borrow chews of tobacco, and 
become a rattling gossiper to establish good-fellowship 
with his parish. On calling he may expect to be 
shown to a seat in the parlor or living room. If ever 
he degenerates to a permanent place by the kitchen 
stove, he will have deserved it by his behavior. It 
was no real compliment to her pastor when his well- 
to-do parishioner said, "I like him, he is so familiar 
like. I can just set him down by the kitchen fire, 
and sometimes he just comes in by the back door!' , 
That pastor would better call at such a house only 
in the summer. If you cannot come in by the front 
door, young men, and keep in the front part of the 
house, if it has one, you would better stay at home. 
This is the rule. If you meet just exceptions you will 
know them. There are homes you should visit, which 
have no parlors, and there are poor without winter 
fires except in the kitchen, and I hope you will have 
many a call to such firesides; but your pastoral use- 
fulness will suffer if you let yourself down below the 
proper claims of your office, as the family you visit 
may be able to recognize them. The minister of the 
parish should stand for something more, socially, than 
the hired man. 

II. — The Pastor in Society 

You are not to cultivate society because of love for 
it. It will claim enough attention whether you work 
in the city or country. Multiplied social engagements 
bring mental dissipation. Love for the parlor and 
love of books are apt to be incompatibles. If a pastor 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 75 

likes his books only well enough to get his sermons, 
the likelihood is the people will not long like his 
sermons. It is neither a high nor a holy ambition in 
a minister or his wife to become society leaders. They 
are to deserve recognition as honorable and useful 
factors where society is at its moral best, but they can 
do better than shine in the ordinary artificial social 
functions. They should stand wholly aloof from a 
good many questionable things which what calls itself 
' ' good society ' ' often tolerates, if it does not approve. 
Into many localities most of these questionable things 
have not come, but many abound with them. Broadly 
speaking, they include everything which tends to the 
secularization of the social circle, the Church itself, 
and therefore the handicapping of the gospel. Let 
a popular pastor and his family become tinctured with 
the snobbery, the worldliness, and frivolity, and the 
mere temporal and fleshy views of life which char- 
acterize many communities, and both the spiritual and 
moral tone of the church and neighborhood will run 
down. Pastoral views and example are no insignifi- 
cant standard with men. Few will look higher for 
models. Milton said that a man who would write 
poetry must himself be a poem. A man who would 
teach Christ must himself be an incarnate gospel. 
Our Lord taught the same thing when He said we 
must "do and teach." There is no greater affliction 
for a parish than a pastor and family whose ideals 
are unspiritual, whose enjoyments are chiefly worldly, 
and who are often venturing on the borderland of 
doubtful things. I cannot give you the advice of Pro- 
fessor Rooke: "never make a funny speech." That 



76 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

depends ou whether you can, or can only add to the 
solemnity of the occasion, and also on the nature of 
your fun. I think this advice is safe: "don't try to 
make a funny speech if you cannot say funny things. ' ' 
Funereal fun is most distressing. 

But though participation in small immoralities and 
things allied is forbidden, there is no reason why the 
pastor shall not be a cultured and even a polished 
gentleman, one who knows enough to keep his finger 
nails clean, his shoes blacked, and to take off his hat 
in an elevator when ladies are present. It is not 
meant that his family are to go in strait- jackets 
and do penance for the community. What is meant 
is simply that neither he nor his are to be worldlings 
or boors. Religion calls for neither the strut of the 
dandy nor the gait of the clodhopper. It calls for the 
gentleman, and the contents of that term are likely to 
enlarge in the mind as the years go by. There is no 
law of the land or of the kingdom to require you to 
wear in public offices a Prince Albert coat. Just why 
a prince of the blood, dead or alive, should set a rule 
for ministers of the gospel is not clear. The thing 
that is clear is that society will exact propriety of 
apparel. Some may sneer at the idea that a man's 
coat shall determine his social grade. Really, it does 
not. People merely interpret the preacher, discover 
his grade, by the taste he shows in his garments. 
They are a sort of outside credentials of the man 
within. So are other things. A very good man may 
take his food from his knife, or pour his coffee into 
his saucer, or wear his overshoes into the parlor, or 
sport checked pants beneath a big seal on his watch 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 77 

chain ; but people will judge him by the signs he hangs 
out, precisely as they do the man who does business 
behind the three gilt balls. A clergyman's social 
entree often depends a good deal on such matters, and 
it is well-nigh fatal to him when he is shut out or is 
deservingly made the subject of sharp social criticism. 

A pastor who can perform certain social functions 
attaching to his office in good form is at an advantage : 
for example, make a good after-dinner or harvest- 
home speech. Had anybody impressed this on some of 
us twenty years ago, we would now be grateful. Your 
people will know you as good preachers, but the gen- 
eral public will see you chiefly at the weddings, meet- 
ings for social festivity, and such like places. A 
happy marriage ceremony, neither a bony Puritan 
skeleton, nor a dish of sophomore sweetmeats, and 
which presents the minister as a graceful gentleman, 
has often been a passport to favor. None of us ever 
gets too old for sentiment and good taste at wed- 
dings. Our denominational barrenness of certain sim- 
ple aesthetic forms is neither a cardinal principle of 
Protestantism, nor the dictate of a sound pastoral 
judgment. And may it be hinted that if you read 
the ceremony you have prepared, no harm will be 
done, nor will the effort to join the couple in wed- 
lock fail in case you should omit to say that marriage 
began in the garden of Eden. The couple will be 
perfectly content to accept it on the authority of the 
heart without historical warrant, and everybody- pres- 
ent will hope it will continue in fashion. 

The same general principle should characterize your 
services at funerals. Aside from all questions as to 



78 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

the contents of the addresses and prayers, attention 
is to be paid to the fitness of things. There is an un- 
finished, ravelled- at-the-edge fashion of doing things, 
an appearance of unpreparedness, a disjointed, sput- 
tering procession of thoughts and events which peo- 
ple observe and disapprove. 

Now all these things are mere details of the greater 
things with which they are connected. Yet they touch 
the line of perfection, which is no small thing. The 
blush on the grape is the most superficial and minor 
part of it; 3 T et nobody will buy a basket of grapes 
without the blush on them. These delicate, almost 
impalpable things go far toward giving the pastor a 
charm. 

III. — The Pastor in the Larger World 

The world may be either ecclesiastical or secular. 
For one thing, it is to be noted that vigorous denomi- 
nationalism does not bar churchly courtesy. To be a 
United Presbyterian one does not need to be a bigot. 
He may be the very pink of courtesy, and yet not 
sing hymns when in the Methodist Church or submit 
himself to immersion when he worships with the Bap- 
tists. One can join in union services where human 
hymns are sung without being responsible for the 
singing. A horse does not eat the thistles in his hay 
nor does he refuse the hay. There are vastly im- 
portant matters in the gospel which all hold in com- 
mon, and they are sufficient warrant for convenient 
joint services. We are not in the ministry to make 
the church life turn on points of disagreement. Every 
family has its points of difference and even conflicts 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 79 

of opinion, which yet are not counted sufficient rea- 
sons for alienation and desertion one of another. There 
is still basis for affection and union. And this is 
precisely true of denominations in the body of Christ. 
Do not make yourself ridiculous and a needless 
offense, even to your own people, by pressing on sec- 
tarian exclusiveness when the community is obeying 
some call to visible unity in the house of God. If 
you are invited to preach for your Methodist brother, 
do so. Open your pulpit to him in return, and be in 
like manner courteous to all evangelical churches. 
Never show yourself selfish, particularly as a prose- 
lytizer, determined to increase your membership no 
matter at whose expense. 

It goes without saying that you should keep out of 
political strife; that you should not seek to thrust 
your political judgment as a citizen down the throats 
of other citizens who may sit in your pews; and that 
the most pressing moral reforms are not to appear so 
frequently in your pulpit as to nauseate your hearers. 
Nothing is more important in spiritual doctrine than 
faith, and nothing in moral reform than temperance; 
but both may be preached wholly out of proportion. 
Neither the moral law nor the gospel is lopsided, and 
you are to be watchful that your ministry does not 
become so. Nothing on the continent is so solemnly 
ludicrous as this new thing called a gospel temperance 
church. Of course, your pulpit is to give no uncer- 
tain sound on both private and public morals, and 
particularly on the great question of intemperance, 
and as to public policy, or on vast moral issues. In 
New Testament times no great moral change for the 



80 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

better has come without plenty of earnest preaching, 
and no great moral retrogression has occurred except 
where the pulpit has been silent on the principle of 
righteousness involved. No inspired prophet is needed 
to judge the future by the past. Moreover, our Book 
of Government requires you to be a reformer, and to 
promise, with the elders and deacons, "not to give 
yourself up to a detestable neutrality in the cause of 
God." His cause includes clean morals. Yet do not 
harbor the false notion that moral reform is to be 
the chief and the attractive substance of your preach- 
ing. That is to be the gospel. Be very sure, more- 
over, that you do not keep leagues in advance of 
your people and the times in these matters. You 
must be close at the head of the column, otherwise 
you may rush into some imminent, deadly breach, 
and find yourself alone. You will do no good, and 
simply become the mark for bullets before and behind. 
After a little you will be shot down and dragged out 
of that pastorate, and all you will have gained will 
be the privilege of being chief mourner at your own 
pastoral funeral. Do not think you will be "time- 
servers" if you honestly try to find suitable times 
and seasons for all your messages of truth. 

Little remains to be said as we send you out to be- 
come pastors of flocks. We have ministered to you 
abundantly in spiritual things, and have taught the 
wisdom of books as the Church requires. We have 
especially endeavored to give profound lodgment to 
the great doctrines of revelation. And now we close 
with this familiar talk concerning wisdom and duty 
in the pastor's life. May you be good men, and wise 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 81 

men, and men successful in your high calling, and at 
length hear the Master say: " Well done, good and 
faithful servants." In token of the work you have 
done, and the judgment of the Seminary as to your 
scholarly fitness for the pastor's office, we take pleas- 
ure in placing our diploma in your hands. 



A MINISTER'S SENSE OP RESPONSIBILITY 

Dear Brethren op the Class op 1901: 

It is fitting before we hand you our diploma to 
address you in a few words of parting counsel. There 
are two things we wish to say: 

I. — Be possessed by a sense of responsibility. You 
have not been devoid of it, yet have depended greatly 
on tutors and governors. 

Have a sense of responsibility for work chosen. 
Do not choose too large places. You are talented 
young men, but the talents of young men will better 
compress to a small place than expand over a very 
large one. There should be due rewards remaining 
for years of experience and faithful service. It is 
so in every other calling; to reverse in the ministry 
is unnatural. But how shall a man know his work? 
Usually by having it pointed out to him by authorized 
parties, not by his own manipulation. He may place 
himself in the line of observation, but not behind the 
wires. Suppose there are jangling voices, conflicting 
signs? He can probably detect a note of agreement 
if he listens, like a strain of melody through bewilder- 
ing improvisations that deluge the ears with sound. 
The signs will really go one way like the September 
whirlwinds that spring up at your feet and throw 
dust in your eyes. A small matter may properly de- 
termine your choice. The Spirit often guides by small 
82 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 83 

things. Form the best unbiassed judgment we can, 
and that will be the mind of God. 

Cultivate a sense of responsibility for work to be 
done. Once entered upon it is yours, not primarily 
that of your workers or even of your session, but 
yours. You are leader, and must devise wise methods 
so far as necessary, and be the chief factor in keeping 
things moving. Of course your first business is to 
preach. The Sabbath services claim chief attention, 
and do it all the week. Your Monday, Tuesday, and 
every other day should pay tribute to the Sabbath. 
The young man who does not keep the question, 
1 ' what shall I preach ? ' ' always before him, and keep 
inquiring of the Master, "Lord, what shall I preach?" 
will not preach well. The Word comes before pastoral 
visitation and all social functions. You are to preach 
the gospel, preach the law, and preach nothing else, 
and preach so that men will listen to you. It will not 
be well to dabble in curious and empty things, such 
as "where did Cain get his wife?" Yourselves and 
your congregations can settle the marriage question 
without consulting Cain. It is not important what 
the maiden in the Song meant by declaring she was 
"black but comely." It has nothing to do with the 
modern color line. I have known one man preach a 
month to a mission church on trichotomy, declaring 
man is threefold, body, soul, and spirit, and not a 
hearer cared a fig for the stuff which had nothing to 
do with the salvation of either soul or spirit. You 
will have small business to dabble in prophecy. Bet- 
ter put most of it aside from the pulpit until the 
day of the new heavens and new earth, when you will 



84 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

know more about it. The man who insists on familiar- 
ity with it and frequently handles such subjects as 
"the one that had ten horns' ' is very apt to get gored 
by more than one of them. This is quite right, for 
while he may reach the truth it is not the important 
truth which is too little known. Better stick to the 
Ten Commandments and the gospel and their plain 
applications. You will not be able to say anything 
very new on these things, but, remember, yours is a 
new generation which needs to know the old things. 
You will be responsible for proper pastoral work. 
This does not mean the covering of neglect by an 
annual pastoral letter, which is well enough in itself; 
nor is duty satisfied by an annual visit or an occa- 
sional call on the sick. It means that in country and 
village pastorates you be enrolled in both foot and 
horse service, and go whenever there seems to be a 
call of immediate need, or a demand for your going 
to keep in touch with the life of your people and 
community. There is not the least danger of over- 
working yourself or overdoing your work. Abraham 
"was called the friend of God," and you are to be 
called the friend of both God and men. You are 
to reach every soul in your parish with the gospel, 
unless it be a practical impossibility. This duty will 
take you into homes, places of business, the fields, and 
will suggest the word for the wayside. Men will wel- 
come you if you be courteous. But some things avoid. 
Don't be a lord. Don't be a gossip. Do not pry into 
secrets. Do not be a revealer of secrets. Do not 
publish unpleasant parish conditions. Do not depend 
on your office, but on grace in it. Do not be a com- 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 85 

plainer, even if things are not to your mind. Don't 
beg or hint for this or that, and if the mistress of 
your manse does so, keep her at home until she learns 
to be a lady. If she talks too much, your pastoral 
visitations had better begin in the parsonage. This 
is the spirit of the Pauline counsels, and Paul knew, 
even though he was not married. Yet the probabil- 
ity is that your wife will be as wise as yourself. 

You will be responsible for the organization of your 
working forces. You are the leader, and everybody 
expects you to act. This does not mean that the 
session and workers have no voice, and that your 
scheme is all the wisdom of the parish. If you per- 
petually insist on your own way, you will estrange 
your most valuable helpers. Do not get into a 
"nriff" because some pet plan is turned down. Your 
judgment may be the best, but you recall the lines in 
the old copy books in the little red schoolhouse, 
"many birds of many kinds, many men of many 
minds." That was juvenile wisdom, but you ought 
rarely to forget it. There is probably too much organ- 
ization in many city churches, but not elsewhere. It 
is not well to take up with the clamor about junk 
shops in church basements for cast-off machinery, 
particularly if you can place the right people at the 
head of your organizations. Organization is the chief 
means of the success of many an ordinary preacher. 
He studies the problem of the prayer meeting, the 
young people's society, the woman's missionary so- 
ciety, the men's league, the Sabbath school and all 
else, keeps in touch and is the chief manager of most, 
devoting constant care to them. Of course the pastor 



86 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

must be in the Sabbath school in some capacity and 
in the young people's meeting's, since eighty-seven 
per cent of his church accessions come thence. They 
will lead a discouraged and dying existence otherwise, 
and the congregation Avill suffer damage, the penally 
for which very soon will be laid on the shoulders of 
the pastor and crush him. You will not be wise in 
setting aside the methods of the old pastor because 
they do not precisely suit yon. He may have been a 
little behind the times. But most young men are like 
the best bananas — plucked green and needing a little 
while to ripen. You do not come to the kingdom to 
be first and foremost upsetters, but to strengthen the 
things that remain, as well as setters up of new. Here 
are two points of wise counsel: first, do not under- 
rate the old pastor's work and ways. Some of the 
people may say disparaging things. Be courteous in 
hearing them, so far as you must, and do not more 
than half believe them. They merely speak from 
their point of view. Often it is meant only as subtle 
flattery of and encouragement for the "talented" 
young pastor with the down on his cheek, and who 
needs to go to Jericho for a full beard. The fact is, 
nothing you carry to your parish is, offhand, to be 
counted better than what the old pastor left behind. 
It may be, but the fact needs to be made clear. 

Particularly, go slow if the complaint is that the 
older man was not relished by the young people. It 
is very possible he did not make enough of them, and 
it is even more possible that the "young folks" were 
a bit bumptious, and took needless offense at his gray 
hairs. If there is anything the New Testament has 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 87 

no use for, it is a young people's church. They are 
to be in it and to have a voice, but their place is sub- 
ordinate, as in most other things well ordered. The 
second suggestion is that you do not think because 
the former pastor's praises are upon every lip that 
you will not be and are not appreciated. I am sure 
you would not wish they should have no pleasant 
memories of him, and treat his name as if he had 
committed robbery and had to go to jail. God bless 
the Christian people who have good words for the 
man who has married them, baptized their children, 
buried their dead, comforted them in their sorrows, 
and pointed the way to God. They will speak just as 
well of you if you deserve it, and so make the next 
pastor miserable if he has no more sense than to think 
past services have no rights, the old pastor no claim 
except to a tombstone epitaph. Do not be so foolish 
as to tolerate a sinking heart when the good old lady 
or the elder tells you about the old pastor preaching 
the best sermons they ever heard. That may not mean 
very much. All of us older ministers are in the habit 
of preaching that kind of sermons, and we know what 
such praises mean. Once a good man came up after 
service to the preacher and heartily said : ' ' that 's the 
best sermon I ever heard from that pulpit." It 
staggered the preacher, for the pulpit was a great 
one ; but while he was recovering from the blow which 
had almost developed symptoms of paralysis, the good 
man prudently remembered the Ninth Commandment 
and went on to say, "at least it is the best I ever 
heard you preach ! ' ' which was different, and thus did 
his best to save the preacher's life, since a swollen 



88 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

head is apt to tend to disease of the heart. But that 
hearer's measurement of the sermon about sizes up 
the value of comparative estimates of work. Good, 
better, best, does not depend so much on the work 
itself as on the man with the measuring line. And 
then, if it is likely to be of any comfort to you in view 
of what you know are shallow judgments, take along 
the consideration that the Reverend Titus Dunder- 
head may be highly appreciated where the Apostle 
Paul would be a failure. You ought to be content to 
stand with the Apostle in occasional mismeasure- 
ments. 

You should have a due sense of responsibility for 
the success of your work. I have heard a minister 
plead that Isaiah failed to win his people to righteous- 
ness, and that Jeremiah failed, and he therefore was in 
good company when he failed to win success with the 
gospel. Do not pinch your fingers with such texts. 
The cases are not parallel. The dispensation of the 
prophets was one of failure, the present one is not. 
The purpose of the gospel is to save men. Its min- 
istry is not one for condemnation, but of salvation. 
The genius of our Lord 's mediatorial work is redemp- 
tive, and this dispensation is to culminate in the spir- 
itual conquest of the world. You are sent to win and 
not to fail. You are more than witnesses for truth; 
you are fellow laborers with the Saviour in minister- 
ing to salvation. You do not labor in the company 
of ceremonial prophets, but of the Prophet Who is 
King in Zion, and over all things. Do not salve over 
your ministerial inefficiency by talk about the hard- 
ness of human hearts. Do not take up with that 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 89 

bilious theology which teaches that things are going, 
and to go, to smash, and all you can do is to get "the 
remnant " ready for the catastrophe. You are here 
to help avert judgment and to introduce a reign of 
righteousness, and your ministry is a blank, a vocifer- 
ous fizzle, unless you save men by bringing them to 
Christ. This does not mean that you can so preach 
as to save everybody who hears you, but that you can 
so minister by the Spirit as to save many, and perpet- 
uate and increase the generation of the godly on the 
earth. Take the parables of the Talents and the 
Pounds to yourselves on your knees, and in your 
study, to your pulpit, and from house to house. Men 
are discharged who do not have success in other call- 
ings. It would be a most marvelous anomaly if men 
with impunity fail of good fruit in the gospel min- 
istry and keep their skirts clear of responsibility. One 
thing is sure : no matter what theory you may hold, 
your congregation will demand success. No good will 
come of laying failure on the session, lack of harmony 
among the people, or wrong opposition to yourself. 
If the field does not suit you, or you it, get out of it. 
Above all things else do not settle down to a fight 
for personal ascendency. "The servant of the Lord 
must not strive. " The law of "persona non grata" 
is just as applicable in the kingdom of God as in any 
other kingdom. Of course you may be mistreated, yet 
a minister with a persistent personal fight on his 
hands cannot succeed with the gospel of peace. You 
will not be a coward if you run away. It will require 
spiritual courage to do it. But remember that what 
the Lord requires is that you preach His gospel with 



90 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

success, and you have no rights in your field which 
are superior to this great end. 

You often hear it said that we are not responsible 
for results but for faithfulness. Do not be fooled by 
this lazy or discouraged man's aphorism. Good re- 
sults are coupled by the Lord with faithful work. 
Be really faithful, and you will not be without good 
fruit, even though you cannot determine the amount. 
Some will be thirty, some sixty, and some one hun- 
dredfold. Of course you may exact too much re- 
sponsibility of yourselves. But the danger does not 
lie in this direction. Cultivate the sense of obligation 
as a sine qua non of useful lives. 

II. — Cultivate moral earnestness. On this depends 
your sense of responsibility. Some things pass for 
moral earnestness which do not necessarily reach so 
far. One is mere professionalism, the exact discharge 
of ministerial duty. It may be done without much 
heart because it has been nominated in the pastoral 
bond. A friend pointed out a man on the street car 
the other day, saying, "his firm promoted that man 
the other day, because while the other clerks locked 
their desks and hurried out on the stroke of the clock, 
he was disposed to remain to clear up the work." A 
like spirit is to characterize you. Be faithfully ear- 
nest and not hirelings. Another thing is personalism, 
an absorbing purpose to make the most out of one's 
self in culture and attainment of station. It leads to 
excellent displays of personal quality, but may be as 
devoid of moral earnestness as a crooked line is of 
straightness. It is the unholy ambition of not a few 
young men, and so inflates them that some punctur- 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 91 

ing providences are necessary before they can be much 
used. And yet another thing is Congregationalism, 
not the mode of government, but the determination 
to make the church grow by hook or crook. The 
pastor lives in the idea that the church must in- 
crease, and it should, but not by means that swell the 
roll and do not enlarge the kingdom. Now since these 
things do not in themselves mark moral earnestness, 
what is it? It is the absorbing purpose to use all 
one's powers and opportunities to advance the salva- 
tion of men and the glory of God. Personality, pro- 
fession, and congregation come distinctly second, and 
sometimes they should not come at all. 

Three factors will show themselves in a morally 
earnest minister: 

(1) He will be manly. Let the word stand for 
moral virtues in general. God will not make a good 
minister out of a fellow who persists in being small 
and mean. Deficiency in the commonplace virtues will 
soon brand a man as unfit for service. Said an inn- 
keeper, "I don't like that minister. I accommodated 
him in many things without charge, and he stood on 
ten cents when we settled." Ten cent men are not 
manly. 

(2) He will be industrious. A lazy man is not 
much in earnest. There is some ground for saying 
some pastors are lazy. They coddle themselves and 
permit many needless interruptions of their work. A 
business man would never dream of slighting his work 
for the same reasons. At this point this class of 
pastors may learn from the laity. There is a world 
of truth in the old proverb, "there is no excellence 



92 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

without great labor." If you will achieve excellence 
and show earnestness you must work, work, work ! 

(3) He will devoutly and constantly depend on 
God for strength to do his work and keep his con- 
science clear iu view of the duty to which he has been 
commissioned. No man can have much sense of re- 
sponsibility who does not labor much in prayer. ' ' His 
strength is in the Lord." 

Young brethren, you have done our work well in 
the Seminary, but we have divided the responsibility 
with you. This is possible no longer. You go out 
now to fields where you must bear your own burdens. 
Six or seven volunteered for the foreign field. Prob- 
ably more would have done so had it been worth while. 
One goes. Wherever you go, the cure and care of 
many souls will rest directly upon you. May you 
intensely realize your true relation to them and your 
responsibility to God to Whom you must give account, 
and do your work well, and each deserve the title, ' ' a 
man of God." We expect much of you. When the 
time of reckoning comes may you and we alike have 
a good account to give, have no shame in our faces, 
and be welcomed to the joys of our Lord ! 



A HANDFUL OF WISDOM 

Dear Brethren of the Class of 1902 : 

You will not expect anything* entirely new in our 
parting counsels. We have given you our best here- 
tofore, and all that can now be done is to stir up your 
pure minds by way of remembrance. No magical 
secret has been kept for the last. Your ministry is 
not to be by occult methods, but by natural agencies 
and traits, quickened and intensified and guided by 
the Holy Ghost. 

The first to be mentioned is True Manliness. This 
was named to last year's class. It is of such cardinal 
importance as to merit frequent repetition. It con- 
cerns every minister as fundamental to his work. Its 
physical basis is the body. It depends very much on 
such commonplaces as eating good food, taking plenty 
of sleep, cultivating wise habits of study, and hav- 
ing an abundance of recreation. A good eater and a 
good rester is so far a good preacher. A bad stomach 
and a tired brain do much toward crippling one's 
ministry. The duty of every congregation is to pro- 
vide a vacation at a suitable time for its pastor, and 
if it does not, his duty is to take one at any rate. 
Churches have no call to be less wise than good busi- 
ness houses, which now generally recognize the right 
of their employees to an annual rest. The body in 
good trim, the cultivation of manly traits is easier, 
93 



94 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

even though the physique of a Hercules is sometimes 
associated with the mind of a boor and the spirit of 
a sneak. Robert Hall and Richard Baxter may be cited 
to show what consecrated men of God may do despite 
sick bodies, but they are not the models for a young 
man to imitate if he is starting out in good health. 

It is difficult to define in a word the manliness we 
have in view. If you want to know what it is not, 
take up the average modern novel depicting min- 
isterial character. Fiction has little place for things 
as truly noble as a consecrated man of God. It too 
often dives into the pool of social filth, or swims on 
the scum of fashionable gilding, and hates doctrinal 
orthodoxy with a fervor born of ignorance and wick- 
edness, and cannot deal fairly with the clergy of 
better quality. They are not sufficiently sensational 
to make spicy reading. But the modern novel cer- 
tainly sets out a good many things a minister ought 
not to be. Some things by way of a partial catalogue 
of the manly minister's virtues may be here set down : 
he is candid, honest, truthful, sympathetic, unselfish, 
generous to all, whether friends or not, accommoda- 
ting, courageous when there is any call, courteous, 
peace-loving, without grudges, not disposed to attrib- 
ute wrong motives to men, tender of the feelings of 
all. Manliness forbids falseness, narrowness, mean- 
ness, pettiness of all sorts. The very first requisite 
of a good minister is that he be a real man. People 
see through theological and rhetorical veneering, and 
mere superficial religiousness, and if the man is want- 
ing they soon want a new minister. Cultivate the 
matter-of-fact virtues, the every-day qualities that are 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 95 

at a premium among men in business and society, and 
even if your pulpit work is not that of a genius, men 
will get good out of your ministry. They will not 
get much if they know your store bills are habitually 
unpaid, and that you do things by finesse, and have 
a selfish spirit. 

A second thing to be cultivated by the minister is 
Sympathy with men in all their experiences. It is 
truly a Christlike quality. A hard man has not much 
place in the pulpit or pastorate. The tender heart 
wins its way. People think vastly more of the pastor's 
kindness than of his theology. They want theology 
in its place, but the sympathetic element warms the 
soul. They do not relish a man who makes measured 
and icily formal visits to the sick bedside, and who 
has no concern for the mourners after the funeral. 
I saw the pastoral gift of one of the pulpit celebri- 
ties some years ago. It was at a meagerly attended 
funeral of a lady who had resided at a distance and 
who was brought here for burial. She was unknown 
to him, but he sympathized with the weeping friends. 
He asked about the ailment, the family left behind, 
the period of former residence in Allegheny, the 
church connections, the hope of the deceased, and ex- 
pressed his sorrow and sympathy in the most cordial 
manner. There was nothing remarkable about the 
service which he conducted but the profound sym- 
pathy of the man who ministered. I did not wonder 
at the sorrow of many people when some years later 
he was himself called home. The same trait showed 
itself in his preaching. There are some men who 
are always called in on funeral occasions. People 



96 PASTORAL HOMTLIES 

smile at it, but it is often a marked tribute to the 
heart the men have displayed in their ministerial 
careers. Human nature lives from the heart more 
than from the head. Happy the man who is so human 
as to fasten the affections of men upon himself ! The 
finest tribute to Washington was that he was "first 
in the hearts of his countrymen." Young brethren, 
cultivate the humanities. Seek to feel for men in sin, 
suffering, perplexity, and the manifold problems, and 
crosses, and heartbreaks of our earthly life. Despise 
not the souls to whom you are sent. Remember they 
are not despised of the Master Who sends you. Many 
will abound in the most distasteful meannesses of sin. 
Let them not harden your heart. They never did 
the Master's. A minister has lost his power when he 
comes into personal antagonism to the race to which 
he belongs. A bilious critic said, "the more I see 
of men the more I love dogs." And sometimes min- 
isters get almost similarly disordered. They are 
henceforth unfitted to preach the gospel of good-will 
to men. Bile is neither theology nor religion, nor yet 
pastoral quality. The preaching to which you are 
bidden is not simply precept, but spirit as well. 
"With the heart man believeth unto righteousness," 
and with the heart faith in our loving Lord is to be 
preached. This temper of soul will bring freshness 
of feeling. The new phases of human life the pastor 
continually meets should awaken fitting, correspond- 
ent thoughts and emotions. The sympathetic man has 
in this characteristic a guarantee against growing old 
and dusty. His heart keeps young. This sort of man 
becomes the old minister in the pastorate. His frosty 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 97 

hair has not poured frost upon his spirit. That is 
buoyant and full of youthful zest for life as it is 
around him. It is often the clergyman with fossil- 
ized sympathies who is without a parish. He has 
parted company with happy-hearted men. 

A third great requisite for the minister is Positive 
Convictions. A weaving, wabbly mind has no business 
in the pulpit. The Bible is not a book of guesses. Its 
doctrines of faith and morals are not matters of 
changing speculation and variable adjustment to suit 
the audience. It ought not to matter to the preacher 
what his hearers want in case they do not want the 
truth as he believes it. He is in the desk not to be 
an echo of his people's minds, but of the Word of 
God as he understands it. Particularly he is not to 
have an eye to the judgment of a few, but the wants 
of the many. He is an interpreter of oracles and 
not a post to cast a shadow. To fill his mission he 
must himself be persuaded as to where the truth lies. 
He is not to raise questions and conduct investigations 
from his pulpit, but to announce conclusions and en- 
force them. He is a gnostic, one knowing, not an 
agnostic, a man of uncertain mind. "Know-noth- 
ings" may have a mission in politics, but none in the 
pulpit. People put a man into the pulpit not for what 
he does not know. He is set there to minister in the 
verities. A bit of doggerel describes the uncertain 
minister : 

" Twixt turning in and turning out 
He leaves the beholder still in doubt, 
Whether the bird that makes the track 
Is going west or coming back." 



98 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

Dr. Kennard reports a parishioner as thus describ- 
ing his late dear pastor: "He was a nice gentleman 
with an evenly balanced mind : one part of his mind 
thought he would and one part thought he wouldn 't ! ' ' 
Now all this does not mean that a theological student 
is not to be open to new light ; but it does mean that 
he be settled on the great fundamentals before he 
accepts the office of public teacher. We have no con- 
fidence in the modern dictum that if the heart is right 
it is not so important about the head. The United 
Presbyterian idea is that the head and heart belong 
to the same man, and that when the head is sick the 
heart is faint. We have been taking care of your 
heads as the most important members of your per- 
sonalities. Do you do the same and stand by the 
faith which may first of all be reduced to a series of 
intellectual propositions. And never was there more 
need of intellectual certainty in the pulpit than now. 
This is a questioning period. Men are shaken on their 
foundations. They have no reason for forsaking them 
except that the critics, and papers, and erratic pulpits, 
which have the favor of the press, are prophesying an 
earthquake. They are simply in the line of the false 
prophets, who are always with us and often don't 
know any better. Earthquakes do not come by 
prophecy. The clamor makes it all the more imper- 
ative that you be able to speak from throats of brass 
and not be afraid. The true line of defence of the 
faith is not a compromise. "Ye cannot serve God 
and mammon. ' ' The Christian scheme is as well artic- 
ulated as the multiplication table, and there is noth- 
ing to be surrendered. You might as well strike out 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 99 

twelve times twelve as touch a fundamental. In the 
judgment of your teachers there is not even anything 
to be taken from your Calvinism. It is but the inter- 
pretation of the Bible into a formulated logical order. 
Connected with this is a fourth qualification which 
may be called Steadiness. There are some motor men 
who make the car go by fits and starts, and hence 
the passengers abound in the same things. A congre- 
gation and a pulpit may be managed in the same way. 
People feel an unsteady hand very soon and are not 
contented. Congregational life and pulpit work do 
not take kindly to jolts. These have their recognized 
code of proprieties. The methods of the hustings can- 
not well be adapted to sacred things. The ways of 
the traveling evangelists do not as a rule suit the 
settled pastor. Informal, free and easy methods are 
not generally productive of the best reverential feel- 
ings in the sanctuary. Stated worship lends itself to 
a simple ritual. It is apt to be illy directed and lack- 
ing reverence without it. Even prayer meetings can- 
not be made up of novelties to advantage. Paul had 
this trouble with the Corinthians, and required them 
to behave themselves. Sacred things are to be handled 
in decency and in order. There is a growing tend- 
ency to load the public services with bric-a-brac to the 
great damage of the occasions. The purpose is to 
render the worship more attractive, and it is praise- 
worthy, but the means may well be questioned. Espe- 
cially is tins true if the sermon is pushed into a 
corner. Do not imagine that twenty-five minutes of 
thin talk will be enriched by twenty other minutes of 
ceremonial padding. A poor fowl is not any better 



100 PASTORAL ITOMILTES 

eating because it abounds with stuffing. Remember 
that on your part of the work the value of the services 
will largely depend. Enrich the service chiefly by 
becoming a better preacher, by obtaining gift in pub- 
lic prayer, by learning how to choose Psalms, by 
getting ability to read the Scriptures, and to do what- 
ever else pertains to you. Do not affect pulpit antics ; 
do not pick out startling things to say; do not seek 
to astonish anybody; do not pick up your theology 
from current literature until you have verified it. Not 
a heresy of the past but can be found regilded and 
with paint on its face in the publications of the day. 
You ask, "What is a poor fellow with two sermons a 
week to do?" Stick to what you have been taught, 
until you know by adequate examination that it is 
wrong. We have not given you speculations, but the 
faith of the ages. You will not find it upset in the 
magazines. This same steadiness is to characterize 
you in the pastoral work. A sedate, trustworthy be- 
havior is wanted everywhere, even though you are 
young. People want to know what to expect of you 
before they will thoroughly confide in you as their 
pastor. 

The last thing we wish to recommend is that you 
soon Learn How to Unload Burdens. This does not 
mean that you are to lay aside responsibility, but 
that you are not always to be oppressed by the sense 
of it. It may seem very devoted to have something 
always weighing you down ; in fact it is very foolish. 
For example, your sermons. They should be left in 
your study when the mid-day meal is called. Eating 
is then your business, and it is just as important you 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 101 

do it well as that you get good sermons. Your wife 
will not have a dish of Greek roots and theological 
conundrums on the table, you may depend. If these 
things follow you to meals, drive them out. Ghosts 
are always nuisances. They have no rights at dinner 
that "a white man is bound to respect." Keep your 
sermons off your soul until time to work with them 
again comes around. If you have a pastoral heart, 
you w T ill be burdened with the w T ants and woes of 
your parish; but do not take them to bed with you. 
Leave them and all else with the Lord, and go to 
sleep and sleep eight hours. If your heart and brain 
have done their duty, you will have earned your rest. 
Devotion to God and your parish does not require 
that you set up unwise habits of student or pastoral 
life. When you have done your best at anything, 
leave it w T ith God, else you are not practicing the 
faith you preach. 

And now, dear brethren, we have reached the part- 
ing of the ways. The Seminary remains here, and 
your professors, and you go out yonder into the 
wide world, to where the truth is more or less fully 
preached, and some of you to where it is not known. 
You are to joyfully remember that wherever you go 
you carry the gospel of the kingdom, and that the 
kingdom of this world is to become the kingdom of 
our Lord and of His Christ. You go on no losing 
errand. The day of dominion is coming and its 
tokens are in the sky. You are to be soldiers of con- 
quest. And yet this is not all your mission : you are 
to be ministers of comfort to weary and sorrowing 
men. ' ' Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your 



102 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

God." Comfort and conquest both come by preach- 
ing the simple gospel, and preaching it with loyalty 
to God and tenderness to men. May you be blessed 
as preachers of the divine message and yourselves be 
saved in the glorious day of the Redeemer's appear- 
ing and kingdom! These are our exhortations, and 
good wishes, and farewells. 



PAULINE COUNSELS TO YOUNG MEN 

Dear Brethren of the Class of 1903 : 

On the last stretch of his voyage toward Rome 
Paul and his company took passage in a ship of Alex- 
andria, whose sign was Castor and Pollux. Luke puts 
it down in his narrative as a lively reminiscence of 
that most eventful journey. So likewise you are just 
finishing the last stadium of your experience with us, 
and it seems fitting to take as the guide of the hour 
one of the thoughts of this great pilot of young men. 
It was written to Timothy and suits us all : ' ' Where- 
fore, I put thee in remembrance, that thou stir up 
the gift of God which is in thee by the putting on of 
my hands; for God hath not given us the spirit of 
fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound 
mind. ,, 

You have not been ordained by any laying on of 
hands as yet, but already you have received the gift 
of God which is, in general, qualifications for the min- 
istry. Ordination is but the ecclesiastical recognition 
of the gift, and the bestowment of office in the Church. 
No mysterious influence proceeds from the hands 
which ordain. Gifts and graces do not depend on the 
rites performed by sinful men. The true ordination 
is the work of the Holy Ghost. 

The gift of God for the ministry is partially item- 
ized in several points as follows: first, "God hath 
103 



104 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

not given us the spirit of fear." This is negative. 
The cowardice of ministers is not a divine bestowment. 
The white feather may sometimes be displayed by 
clergymen, but it is no part of the equipment of the 
office of the ministry, any more than is a particular 
cut of vest or color of tie. Probably Timothy had 
given some signs of shrinking from the malignant 
persecutions of the times. He was a young man and 
neither fully confirmed in character nor ripened in 
the faith. Youth is liable to be either too yielding or 
too stiff, so stiff as to be brittle. Time and experience 
are required to give the Damascus temper in very 
many cases. A young minister may easily be over- 
bold, even impertinent and rash. Or he may be tim- 
orous or weakly, hesitating when duty calls for de- 
cisive action. What is wanted is the balanced mind. 
There is a fearfulness and timidity arising from 
a tendency to defer to great names and current 
thoughts. We have had it preached to us so much 
that we are to keep pace with the times, that we 
sometimes practically surrender ourselves to the drift 
of things and raise no questions. We are afraid to 
raise the voice in remonstrance or interrogation. Yet 
we need not be told that the times are not infallible, 
particularly in morals and religion. Why should we 
defer to the times unless the times are right? None 
of their oracles are inspired, and some of them do not 
even have good sense. If a minister keeps up with 
his times, in theology for example, he will never know 
what he is or what he thinks. We are told he must 
keep up with orthodox thought. How will he know 
what is orthodox? By what somebody else believes? 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 105 

By what the large Churches incline to? But they 
differ widely. The fact is a man is not called to 
keep pace with the times in anything unless the pro- 
ceeding approves itself to his best judgment as a 
thinking man. A man's mind ought not to be con- 
trolled by somebody else's ipse dixit. And no man 
has reason to be ashamed of a position he has assumed 
on what he counts adequate ground. His good logic 
will consider the other man mistaken. We have a 
right to a voice in moulding the times in which we 
live, and not for a moment are we to play the coward 
by allowing the spirit of fear to dominate our min- 
istry. What if dogmatic science clamorously declaims 
that our very remote ancestors were monkeys ! Shall 
we feel compelled to write in our creed that Adam 
was the first man, but before him was a highly re- 
spectable company of apes which aspired to be Adams ? 
What if certain critics report that they have clearly 
discovered that Moses did not write the Pentateuch. 
Shall we receive their testimony before they have 
made the matter clear to us? We are the jury in 
the case, and with us rests the verdict. The trouble 
with these people is they want to be everything. 
What if so great a name as Harnack declares against 
the virgin birth of our Lord. Have we not the same 
evidence as he, and are we not as competent to pass 
upon plain testimony? We are not egotists because 
we insist in judging for ourselves. What I wish to 
impress, young brethren, is that you are not to be in 
bondage to any name or any trend of the times. 
Think your own thoughts, weigh in your own bal- 
ances, test by the standard God has given you. Never 



106 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

were there more Shibboleths to confuse the brain 
and tongue, and therefore more need to be strong 
and of a good courage. 

There is also a spirit of fear which prevents one 
from preaching the plain and suitable truth as the 
times seem to demand. It is difficult often to know 
what to do. Yet there is no need of tumbling the 
ark of God into the ditch to satisfy a morbid sense 
of duty. The signs of the times should be consulted 
with care before thundering from the pulpit. A 
prudent man is not necessarily a coward and recreant 
to his convictions. It is wickedly foolish to set one's 
self to preach a man out of the church. If he 
goes out under wise and faithful preaching, that is 
another matter. It is not the part of faithfulness 
to say hard and biting things. Aquafortis is rarely a 
good remedy. But, on the other hand, there may be 
an excessive reluctance to speak about unpleasant 
things. One can find many plausible excuses, which 
seem to his predilections good reasons, for refraining 
from pulpit teachings, counsels, and rebukes. Yet you 
are set for utterance on the whole range of doctrine 
and morals, and it will be your duty to speak at 
fitting times, and in a courteous and kindly way, 
upon moral and spiritual issues as they arise. You 
must not shrink from points of doctrine lest you be 
made unpopular; nor from such matters as the Sab- 
bath, temperance, immoral amusements. You, and 
not the police, are the true conservators of morals. 
You may depend that if the pulpit is dumb the 
Church will be dumb, and the world will go backward 
in its sins. 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 107 

There is a fearfulness of despondency. A good 
minister may get the bines. Elijah was a prophet of 
the Lord and had just faced and confounded the 
prophets of Baal on Carmel. But we find him a day's 
journey in the wilderness requesting that he might 
die, and saying, "Now, Lord, take away my life, 
for I am not better than my fathers. ' ' This is an ex- 
treme case, but there are plenty of others, even though 
less pronounced. Robertson gives four causes of this 
resolute man's despondency: First, relaxation of 
physical strength. Jezebel had sent him word that 
she would kill him because of the execution of the 
priests of Baal. He therefore ran for his life, and 
sought safety in the wilderness. He was worn out 
with travel and anxiety. Second, he craved sympa- 
thy in his crusade against the sins of the day and 
could find none. Israel had slain the Lord's prophets 
until he supposed he alone was left. He was heart- 
broken in his loneliness. Third, he lacked occupa- 
tion. He had been driven out of the country as a 
hare before the hounds. He had no work left but 
that of running away. His prophet's calling was 
abandoned for the hiding holes of the hills. Fourth, 
disappointment in his hope of success. He had 
thought on Carmel that Israel was about to pass from 
pagan worship to that of the true God. The hope 
had flown in alarm at the rise of a wicked woman's 
anger. Now let all this describe your possible de- 
spondency. It is pretty sure to come. What is the 
curel It is very commonplace, for we are just ordi- 
nary mortals. The very first thing the Lord did for 
Elijah was to send an angel with a full meal. Gen- 



108 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

erals know men fight better on a full breakfast than 
after a hard march and with nothing to eat. Many 
a despondent minister needs only to recruit his ex- 
hausted strength. His blues and irritability are not 
so much sins as physiological phenomena. He does 
not so much need to pray over them as to take a 
rest. The angel may not have said to the nervous 
prophet: "take a vacation in the woods," but that 
was just what he did. He went to the mountains, to 
Horeb, and lodged in the bosom of Nature, in a cave. 
There the Lord met and cured him of his worn and 
weary condition, as He has many since by the balm 
of Nature and the teachings of the spirit of calmness 
and wisdom. And then, when he was restored to his 
normal health again, and he could measure the prom- 
ise aright, he was assured of the ultimate victoiy of 
God's cause against idolatry in the land, and went 
forth to find Elisha and to inaugurate a new cam- 
paign for national righteousness. Young brethren, 
in times of serious despondency seek the cause in 
your bodies, relax your drafts upon your strength, 
and obtain a new vision of the promise and pur- 
pose of God to accomplish His w r ill by you, and ulti- 
mately to crown with victory the banner of the 
cross. 

A minister, then, may have some things which are 
no part of his ministerial gift. Let us turn to the 
three features named of the actual divine endowment 
for the ministry. One is "the spirit of power." It 
appears to be in contrast with the cowardice con- 
demned. A fearful man is a weakling. There were 
men in the Civil War who always had battle pains 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 109 

when a fight was coming on, and who got well as 
soon as it was over. They invariably stayed behind 
unless they were unfortunate and were caught at it. 
Dead wood were they on account of their fears. A 
minister to have power must have courage. The two 
words are with Paul here pretty much the same. 
Power is not a mysterious, mystical something which 
comes near the miraculous in the preacher's experi- 
ence. It is the product of the Spirit of God in the 
soul. He has made anew. It shows itself in holy 
faith in the word preached ; it equips the tongue for 
fitting speech; it gives the preacher the grace of holy 
life ; it puts him in right attitude toward questions of 
morals and of tact ; it delivers him from the snares of 
the devil as a man and a minister. All such things 
are by the Spirit. Power is not voice at a bellow. The 
bulls of Bashan had that, and they were not preach- 
ers. It is not log-rolling in the congregation and the 
church courts. It is not a sanctified false face and a 
smirk of artificial holiness. It is not even oratory, as 
men speak of noble speech. It is the results of all 
those operations of the Holy Ghost in a man by which 
he is qualified for exercising a manly, candid, faith- 
ful, effective ministry in the gospel, in the face of a 
refractory church and a sneering world. Do not go 
searching for power in slick manners, though you are 
not to be boors ; nor yet in faultless clothing, though 
there is no disadvantage in a brushed coat and a clean 
tie; nor yet in fanciful elocution, though the right 
kind is of great value ; nor yet by establishing yourself 
on terms of ' ' I favor you and you favor me, ' ' though 
friends are to be cultivated ; nor even yet by fanciful 



110 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

additions to mere forms of service and newly patented 
ecclesiastical machinery. Power is not here, but in 
the Spirit of power Himself Who gives to all His 
ministers His own ability for service according as 
they wait upon Him. He teaches thy hands to war 
and thy fingers to fight. 

Another element of the equipment from the Holy 
Ghost is "the spirit of love." There is no fear in 
love. ' ' Perfect love casts out fear. ' ' In all time love 
has been the inspiration of true courage. The Chris- 
tian minister has love to God and man. He is valu- 
able up to the measure of his heart power. His heart 
may not show itself in tears and like displays, but 
in being strong and of a good courage. It is the man 
who roots his heart in his parish that lays hold of 
men for God. A mere official is a time-server and is 
at his best in drawing his salary. This spirit of affec- 
tion lays hold of Godhead and of man in His image. 
The more visible phenomena are in the human sphere. 
Hence He will test your love for Him by your love 
for men. Well did the late Bishop of Oxford say 
in one of his addresses to a class of candidates for 
ordination: "You are entering into a share of the 
care of Jesus; you are entering into a portion of the 
travail of His soul Who so loved the world. ' ' " After 
all it is not for yourself to be loved you do your 
work; it is for Him to win it, and He will bide His 
time. It is in them that we are to work our work for 
Him ; never to weary of their tiresome ways, never to 
be sick of their commonplace characters, never to be 
provoked by their sullen hostility or their insincere 
complaisance." "Your love is to be that which 'bear- 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 111 

eth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, 
endureth all things,' and that ' never faileth.' " 

The last thing is "the spirit of a sound mind." 
This is the spirit of soberness, prudence, discretion. 
Probably nothing is more difficult of acquisition than 
common sense. If a man is not born with it, he will 
need to struggle to attain it. Yet a balanced mind is 
of prime importance anywhere, especially in the 
clergy. Much discouragement arises from the lack 
of it; many empty methods of work; foolish judg- 
ments as to doctrine; bad attitudes toward men and 
things; too much self-engrossment and self-conceit. 
There is no reason why a defective judgment shall not 
be remedied by the Spirit of all grace, and for its cure 
there ought to be labor and prayer. Larger knowl- 
edge will do much, the reduction of self-esteem will 
do more, and dependence on God for guidance will 
do most of all. 

Young men, you may have heard of this remark by 
Dr. John T. Pressly. He was being twitted by some 
reverend impertinence on the quality of preachers the 
Seminary was sending out, "Well/' said he, "if you 
and other presbyters will send us good men we will 
send you good ministers." The presbyteries have 
been sending good men, and we believe they are get- 
ting good ministers. You belong to an honorable 
company, and are worthy members of it. "We believe 
in your call to the ministry, and we look for the very 
best work from you. May the spirit of power, of 
love, and of a sound mind be upon you, and may 
the Lord send you help from the sanctuary, and 
strengthen you out of Zion. 



PROBLEMS CONFRONTING THE YOUNG 
MINISTER 

Dear Brethren of the Class of 1904: 

Ere you answer to the last roll-call of the Seminary, 
it seems desirable to offer you a few words of parting 
counsel, both because we have found you teachable 
heretofore and because there never has been a time 
when such words were more needed by you, and al- 
most certainly never will be. You have not yet 
''found yourselves" in the ministry, and the line of 
your life for the years to come is across an almost 
undiscovered country, so far as your present knowl- 
edge is concerned. Let us attend, therefore, to some 
of the problems which face a young minister. 

Some that concern things future may be counted as 
already settled, as, for example, denominational rela- 
tions. It is quite certain most, and perhaps all, of 
you will remain in the mother Church. This is as 
it should be. People generally get along best who 
are loyal to family ties. They understand the genius 
of the house and partake of its blood. The fact is, 
gentlemen, the blood that runs in our veins as de- 
scendants of the Covenanters is a little thick and 
slow for a Church life less strenuous than our own. 
At heart we do not, many of us, take kindly to doc- 
trine and practice less solid than our own. As faith- 
112 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 113 

ful and sensible men yon may be counted on to 
remain in the home where you were brought up. 
Rapid spoken people often say, "0, well, it does not 
make any difference what Church we are in, for we 
are all alike striving to get to heaven." It sounds 
well, but many of us wish to reach glory by the route 
our fathers and mothers trod, and so we stand by the 
Church which they loved and in which they gave us 
to God. I think this is settled with you as a matter 
both of sentiment and of intelligent conviction. 

Another thing pretty generally settled is the ques- 
tion matrimonial. At least judging from all other 
theological classes since the Reformation, it is so. I 
trust letting this audience into this secret is no breach 
of confidence. Probably they knew it at any rate. It 
is too late, therefore, to offer you advice; and even 
if it were not, it would scarcely be worth while, for 
if there is anything a theological student thinks he is 
qualified to do it is to pick out his own wife. It 
certainly is his right, since to him belongs the repent- 
ing, if any is to be done. Seriously, few things in 
life are of so far-reaching importance as the wise set- 
tlement of this problem. The trouble is, it is not 
always counted among the problems, but ranks as a 
festivity. Yet Solomon, out of his abundant experi- 
ence, said, ci a good wife is from the Lord," and left 
the question of the source of the other one open to 
inference. 

A first thing laying itself upon the heart of the 
young minister is the question of settlement. His de- 
vout cry is, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" 
He may even be troubled in mind about it, partic- 



114 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

ularly if the answer is for a time delayed, and others 
of the class, or of the same age and rank, are finding 
pleasant fields. Many a man is required to possess 
his soul in patience and simply wait on the Lord. 
Some of you have reached your first conclusions as 
to settlement, having already found fields. But the 
problem will recur again after a while. Just now 
there may be lingering questions as to the home or the 
foreign field. Where shall you go ? It is not so try- 
ing as it has seemed. Not all can go or be sent to the 
foreign work. The major thing is to be so willing to 
go upon service as to be able to hear the Lord's call 
to go abroad and to know when it is "up" to you. 
I believe you have walked in the light in your de- 
cisions. You have been and are willing to go wher- 
ever you are clearly sent. A man is not to reproach 
himself for not going abroad if it has been made clear 
he should stay at home. The foreign field has mighty 
claims, but you may not be called by them. You have 
considered and decided. 

Most of you are likely to remain at home. What, 
then, about the work you are here to do 1 ? For one 
thing let me say you are not to shrink from a field 
because it is hard. There is a suspicion that some 
young men do. They want easy places, fields where 
faithful labor by other men has put things in good 
order. If this is true of any of you it is shameful. 
If the hard work does not fall properly to the young 
men, on whom does it fall? The place to make a 
young man is a difficult field, and the man to make a 
hard field fruitful is an earnest young fellow, full of 
consecrated strength and holy enthusiasm. If an old, 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 115 

well-established congregation falls to you, who am I 
to find fault with providence ? It is well. But what I 
mean is that a young fellow from the Seminary, able 
for hard knocks, is bound to hold himself in readiness 
to go to places which do not have the reputation of 
carrying their missionaries and pastors to the skies 
on flowery beds of ease. He has no right, as a man 
of God, to shun places of test, and hardship, and 
lowliness of ministerial grade. It is an ecclesiastical 
impertinence to ambitiously place himself in the line 
for high places before he has done a single thing to 
show that he has a right to even the humblest place 
in the ministry. This thing of a boy rattling around 
in Saul's armor has always been unfit, and even ludi- 
crous, since the day David said he was only a boy and 
wouldn't do it. Nothing in all his history better 
shows that lad to be fit stuff to one day become king 
over Israel. 

We will suppose that you have properly settled all 
this. Then what about a country or a city field? It 
has occurred to you, doubtless, that possibly you may 
have no choice. There can be no question as to the 
wrongness of much seeking of calls. Generally speak- 
ing, one is enough for most men in case the man has 
been consulted before its making out. If undesirable 
ones come, at any rate, they should trouble no man's 
conscience. No one is called of the Lord where there 
are manifestly good reasons for not accepting. Elders 
and people are by no means infallible spokesmen for 
the Head of the Church. The field may be unpromis- 
ing, the climate likely to be injurious, the opposition 
or the neutrals strong, the congregational leaders al- 



116 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

most certain prophecies of failure, the salary hope- 
lessly inadequate, the other call more satisfactory by 
far: all such things enter into a case of justifiable 
declinature. A man's conscience cannot be too tender 
about inducing calls; it may be too mawkish about 
determining upon their disposition. I knew a man 
who made out a detailed manifest of camp supplies 
to pass the Canadian customs. The officer laughed 
at its minuteness, and he roared when the gentleman 
came back into the office to say that he had forgotten 
two or three pounds of crackers. That was conscience 
playing the tyrant instead of the mentor. Back of all 
moral decisions is to be the robust, manly judgment 
upon the contents of the case, and if this is present 
you will have no trouble in deciding upon the field, 
although it may take a little time. 

Most of you will settle in the country because there 
are not enough city and village churches to go around. 
You will have to meet the problem of the country 
church. Even with that pressing, I am inclined to 
think yours the happier lot. There is no place on 
the earth where, if he can hold his people together, 
despite the tendencies away from the country, the 
pastor is so much held in deserved honor, is so widely 
useful, as in a well located country parish. I have 
been seeing city pastors of the highest type at their 
work for eighteen years, and knowing the country 
pastor as I do, it is my best judgment that no young 
man ought to shrink from a promising country pas- 
torate. In these days things tend toward the ameliora- 
tion of the unpleasant features of the rural field. The 
mud is, of course, incurable. But then we are to 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 117 

remember that Adam did not live on a paved street, 
and that he came, and we come, from the clay, some- 
times of a very poor sort, and that there are worse 
things than the soil. Telephones, trolleys, rural de- 
livery, daily papers, and the thousand other modern 
conveniences are making the country habitable as it 
was not a half century ago. The country and village 
church is coming toward a better day. The people 
will stay at home better and the church will return 
to something of its old-time power. 

What about the salary connected with settlement? 
Sometimes a witty or stingy layman hints that the 
loudness of a call depends on the amount of the salary. 
Well, if it does not, it generally should. On the 
amount offered very often depends the possibility of 
keeping soul and body together, and when congrega- 
tions are too narrow to offer a decent living it be- 
comes a serious question about committing one's self 
to their care. An old Dutchman in Mercer county 
said he "knew von breacher to get rich at dot trade 
of breaching," but it is the only case I ever heard 
cited. One is not to contemplate an opening in the 
light of salary alone, but it may properly become a 
determining factor as between two fields. The first 
consideration always should be the likelihood of use- 
fulness. We enter the ministry to be useful, not 
merely to make a living. The Dutchman made a mis- 
take in calling the ministry a "trade." It is not a 
commercial instrument, but a high calling to which 
God has attached a living. It is in place to remember 
that Paul said, "the laborer is worthy of his hire." 
The principle was fixed long before you were called 



118 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

to think about how you and your wife could get along 
on six hundred or seven hundred dollars a year and 
no parsonage. Two things you may be sure of in a 
faithful ministry — one is you will have enough to live 
on, and the other is you will not be overpaid. 

Another problem is the sermon. An Allegheny man 
of forty years ago once said to me, * ' I put everything 
I knew into the first two or three sermons, and where 
the next was to come from I did not know." Many 
others have felt the same way, but it is the case of 
the handful of meal and the cruse of oil over again. 
There is often some scraping of the barrel and squeez- 
ing of the cruse, but the cake has generally been 
baked on time, although sometimes a little thin. A 
thin sermon well baked is much better than a thick 
one delivered in the dough. All that is required in or- 
der to find the sermons is to go where they are, that is, 
to the Bible and the study and to stay there until they 
are obtained. The man that finds his sermons on the 
streets often finds only stub ends, secularized religion, 
and the smells of the gutter. Skill comes to the bib- 
lical preacher by practice. In another denomination, 
when some of us were boys, a young minister preached 
his first sermon in his home church. I can hear him 
yet. His text was ' ' Watch and pray. ' ' He said with 
embarrassment that we should watch. Also that we 
should pray. Then he doubled up and said that we 
should both watch and pray. Finally he reversed the 
points and said we should pray and watch. Then he 
concluded by saying it was a good thing to watch and 
pray. He wasn't specially rattled; the trouble was 
he had no ideas to rattle. Twenty years after it was 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 119 

told me that he was the strongest preacher of his 
Church in a great section of country. He had watched 
for sermons, and prayed for sermons, and preached 
sermons until he became a preacher indeed. 

Young brethren, if you will only preach the Bible 
you will never lack something to preach. It is not 
enough to preach biblically; you are to expound the 
Scriptures. That does not mean a perpetual endeavor 
to apply the Word; application should be incidental. 
The main thing is to have really a message from God 
to the people in the way of exposition. Do not be 
too anxious to say, "Dear brethren, we should do this, 
and that, or the other thing." Sometimes give the 
Spirit of God a chance to make the application. Let 
me impress upon you this most important fact, name- 
ly, if you preach the Bible you must preach a good 
deal of doctrine. The Christian religion is not a jelly 
fish, but an organism of the highest type, having 
bones, and ligaments, and all the features of organiza- 
tion. One cannot preach the gospel with any power 
except he follow the thought of God in His Word. 
Every thing is feeble without bones. They need not, 
and should not, stick through the skin, but they must 
be there. A great reason for the public indifference to 
the Church is that very often the pulpit does not say 
anything of importance. The element of real gospel 
instruction is absent. No man can preach Christ sat- 
isfactorily and have no deliverance on His deity, no 
theory of the atonement, no doctrine as to His govern- 
mental authority, no rationale of faith, no dogma of 
the Trinity, no exposition of the being of God, noth- 
ing as to the nature of the change called regeneration, 



120 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

the act and reason of justification, and the experience 
of sanctification, et at. There is no Christianity apart 
from these truths. Christ is a vapor to the multitude 
if not seen in their light. Formal, distinct presenta- 
tion of these things is your duty, for only by the 
pulpit will they ever be understood by the people. 
To-day the average minister assumes them or gives 
them out in piecemeal and in disorganized crumbs. 
Think of a foreign missionary trying to win pagans 
to real Christianity without drilling them on the fun- 
damentals of the faith! And can we maintain the 
cause at home and let these things go without con- 
tinuous publication? The field is not much occupied 
and you have all the liberty of explorers. You are 
to " preach the Word," and the essence of the Word 
is doctrine. Peter and Paul preached it, and it is 
not probable you can do better by following later ex- 
amples. The preaching for our day of which we hear 
not a little is nothing peculiar to these times as we 
might think. It is simply the simple, forceful state- 
ment of the old doctrines of the Cross. There is no 
preaching for the times of any other sort which is 
of any value whatever, or for any other times under 
the sun. 

Yet the third problem is that of a righteous ambi- 
tion. May a minister cherish thoughts of attainments 
and promotions? A certain type of mystics decry 
ambitions altogether. It is thought the ambitious man 
cannot be humble, and that his tendency is to unfaith- 
fulness in his sphere. It is supposed a man should 
settle down to dull monotony of work and never give 
a thought to promotion until it seizes him by the 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 121 

collar and proposes translation. This is spiritualized 
nonsense, just as is the old idea that our first impres- 
sions on a problem are the sure leadings of the Spirit. 
Every minister has the right to excel, and it is his 
duty to seek to do so. It would be a lot better for 
the kingdom if more ministers had this high ambition. 
The unpardonable ambition is that which expects pro- 
motion without desert, acquires jealousy of those who 
advance, makes no effort to fit the man for higher 
rank, and sometimes uses unfair means to lift one's 
self up and pull others down. Would that the Lord's 
prophets were more universally desirous to excel; 
there would be better work done by them. 

It is fitting to seek more personal culture. James 
Hamilton spent his spare time on botany, Chalmers 
on political economy and astronomy; and these things 
went far toward making them what they were. A 
man cannot bring too much knowledge and polish to 
his pulpit work. In some quarters lack of such cul- 
ture is a reproach. A good minister should be intelli- 
gent on current affairs and by his attainments be rec- 
ognized as a superior man. No great furnishings and 
apparatus should be necessary to this. It is competent 
to almost any man in any parish. John Brown, of 
Haddington, our ecclesiastical ancestor, preached in a 
mean little church at the end of a lane, and lived in 
a manse which is said to look like a Chinese laundry, 
and his study was so small that an Allegheny student 
the other day asked the old lady having the house in 
charge, where he kept his books. She replied, "I 
don't think he had any. ' ' He probably had to modern 
eyes only a few, but he was the theological thinker 



122 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

of Scotland in his day. He got culture in plenty, 
even though under difficulties. I commend to you 
your theologies, histories, works on exegesis, the polite 
literature of the day, music, if you have any in your 
soul, and whatever else will make you a superior man. 

A more difficult point is the ambition for more 
worldly possessions. It is a great curse when it ab- 
sorbs one's thought and energies. A church secretary 
once said he could not afford to buy corner lots in a 
certain town because such investments would tend to 
disable him for his work. This may be an extreme 
view, but its principle is right. Yet if one inherits 
money, there is no good reason why he should not 
take care of it. And if he had to take a fortune with 
his wife or lose her, he has no call to squander it. 
Neither is there any good reason why he should not 
take life insurance to a large amount, or not save a 
pittance for the rainy day. There is no piety in bad 
business. 

The most trying question is as to change of place 
from worse to better. Generally speaking a man has 
the right to promotion as he grows more competent. 
The better work is to be done by the better man. But 
to lie awake nights to discover the way of getting 
into a better place, and to be gallivanting around 
from field to field as they open, and to be sending your 
photograph to show how good looking you are, and, 
presumably, usually succeeding only in advertising the 
fact that you are soft in spots, is beneath the dignity 
of a serious-minded clergyman. If you wish to be 
heard at a given point, there is no reason why you 
shall not ask a judicious friend to open the way; but 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 123 

to send your picture and your pedigree is to fall to 
the level of the business that sells Cotswold sheep and 
Jersey cows. I trust you may all be counted worthy 
of advancement, but you should keep out of the ways 
of stock journals. 

Young brethren, you go out from us, but we trust 
you will still be of us in faith, in service, in mutual 
regard, and in the blessed ties of our denominational 
life. May you and we be one in the holiest ambitions 
of the holy ministry of the holy gospel of the most 
holy God. His is the highest service and His the 
eternal reward. May you have long lives, health for 
ministering, much fruitful labor, and many stars in 
your crowns of rejoicing. May men everywhere call 
you blessed for the works that you do, and the Master 
say at the last, ' ' Well done ! ' ' 



CHRIST THE GUIDE OP THE YOUNG MIN- 
ISTER 

Dear Brethren op the Class op 1905 : 

The end of your course in the Seminary has been 
reached, and you face the problems and labor of an 
ordained ministry. The outlook is joyful, but it 
comes burdened with questionings as to the elements 
and measures of success. To increase your equipment, 
as well as to speak a parting word, we turn your 
thought to the ministry of the Lord Jesus, Who in this 
set us an example that we should follow in His steps. 
We are told that "never man spake like this man," 
and that in consequence of this, as well as of the 
nature of the message, "the common people heard 
Him gladly." Some one has said that the Lord must 
think a great deal of the "common people" — He has 
made so many of them. Though of royal degree by 
lineage, He Himself belonged to the common walks of 
life, and His ministry was chiefly among the ordinary 
populace. The insufficiency of earthy good in their 
experience opened the way for His gospel. People up 
to their eyes in the flesh pots of the world do not even 
now take kindly to the message of the Nazarene. His 
salvation will always be most fully welcome to those 
touched by the sense of incompleteness in their lives, 
and to whom an inheritance is a great gain. 
124 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 125 

What was there in His preaching to guide His min- 
isters ? 

I. — He was very human. He brought a true man- 
hood to His work. He did not so much draw upon 
His deity for His pulpit as upon His nature as man. 
Untouched by sin, ennobled by high human ideals, in 
joyful allegiance to His Father, He fashioned His 
work among men, ' ' He took not on Him the nature of 
angels. ' ' Had He so done, He never could have won 
a human audience. His first credential to Galilee and 
Judea was His quality as a man. It will always be a 
first requisite for a worker in the gospel or in any 
other calling among men. Manhood counts four to 
one against learning, ten to one against art. It is 
the bottom round in the preacher's foundation. If 
the candidate does not have it, he is not to seek holy 
orders. Jeremiah searched Jerusalem for a man, and 
that is just the Church's quest in all the gospel ages. 
Talent does not always stand for manhood. Talent 
may stand for egotism. A man's gifts may sur- 
render him to ambition and selfishness, and make him 
thoughtless and careless about other men, even of 
parishioners. What is wanted is a modest regard for 
one's talents, a just consideration of the rights of 
others, cleanness of life, honesty of purpose, friendli- 
ness, and such limpidity of character that men see 
something to esteem whenever it comes under inspec- 
tion. A minister's noble humanness gives him kin- 
ship with his Master and brings to a parish a man 
whose gospel is received because men can trust the 
preacher and lean upon him. Our parting advice is 
first to cultivate the essential substance of manhood. 



126 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

II. — Our Lord was very natural. He was unspoiled 
by the artificialities of life. He lived in simple fashion 
amid a natural people. His nature, from its sheer 
nobility, turned from pretence as alien to proper life 
and a saving gospel. He drew from nature. He sea- 
soned with grace. He spake on the level of men. 
The difference of His "simple life" from that recom- 
mended to-day is in the piety which attuned His every 
act. Simplicity may be barbaric, or boorish, or con- 
ventional, or a fad. None is truly natural not spring- 
ing from a heart right with God and the scheme of 
affairs. He who ministers in his Master's name 
should be a man of natural life, ambitions, and ad- 
dress, not primping before his audience, not affecting 
learning, not preaching overmuch from books, not hid- 
ing his thought in a smoke of words, not posturing, 
not nauseating his audience by rolling up his eyes 
as if in pain from his piety. A veneering of what is 
called "style" helps no man. It is sure to peel off 
at some critical moment. The loss of the lion's skin 
makes a sad disclosure. Tones in reading, fanciful 
sermonic divisions, peculiar notions, saccharine rather 
than devout prayers, a hint of unreality in the preach- 
er's makeup, and the feeling that his gospel is official 
and from the teeth out, go far toward disabling a 
man 's ministry. Be natural in your goodness, natural 
in your public work, natural in your touch with 
men. If culture of any sort spoils your true natural- 
ness, discard the culture. Powder and paint never 
made a woman beautiful or a minister powerful. 
Avoid all thought of gilding, even though your gold 
is only silver. 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 127 

III. — The preacher of Nazareth was sympathetic. 
He was touched with the feeling of our infirmities. 
He knew what was in man. He was no official pro- 
claiming a message, but a man ministering to his fel- 
low-men for their good. His disciples said, " send 
them away hungry," but He said, "give ye them to 
eat." He had been hungry and He sympathized with 
the famishing multitude. Every sermon He preached 
is shot through and through with interest in His audi- 
ence. He bore them upon His heart as well as ad- 
dressed them with words. His pastoral office touched 
with tenderness the sightless eyes and brought Him to 
a brother's grave with the weeping sisters. To-day 
He is the dearly beloved and profoundly adored pas- 
tor and bishop of a multitude of souls. As far as 
maybe you are to follow in His steps. Your ministry 
is not to be undertaken to give you something to do. 
There is plenty of other work which draws less upon 
your sympathies. Unless you are sympathizing with 
men in their sinful and lost estate, you will better 
take work elsewhere. More than half your pay in 
this vocation will be in the coinage of heart — your 
own and those you serve. Money will rarely pour into 
your purse to any alarming extent for the good deeds 
you do. You will visit the sick and bury the dead 
of many people without parishioners' claim upon you, 
and will not be compensated by even thanks. When 
these patrons get married they are very likely to seek 
another minister. One learns after a while that he 
cannot, even if he would, squeeze his calling into a 
money-getter. The genius of the work is different, is 
spiritual. 



128 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

He should early learn that the sermon is not all the 
way through an intellectual process, nor yet a tale of 
Egyptian bricks turned out to keep the taskmaster's 
lash away. It is to be a helping hand to men. It is to 
be properly deferential, not lordly. A man who can- 
not do better than to ride his office into the pulpit is 
astride a very poor mount. It is to touch human life 
from the kinship of the preacher as well as by declar- 
ing revealed truth. He is to carry a soft heart behind 
his syllogisms. The biggest thing about a really big 
man is his big heart. One that sends tears to the eyes 
of the preacher is no objection to a parish. One that 
warms to men in their sin and sorrow, that puts the 
shoulder of the preacher 's soul along with his to whom 
the burden belongs, whom the children love, and the 
young people believe in, and with whom their elders 
counsel not more because of his wisdom than his inter- 
est — this is the man whose very most commonplace 
sermons are clothed for his people with power. You 
and I know that he may not preach so as to stand 
homiletic tests or to look well in print, yet for all that 
his gospel is the power of God. Young men, you will 
not be very sympathetic if you are absorbed in your- 
selves, your alien ambitions, your standing, your sal- 
ary, your health, even your sermons. Instead of these, 
may you find men tugging at your hearts, as did He 
Who came to minister and to give His life a ransom 
for many. 

IV. — The great Preacher believed His doctrine. 
His was the power of personal conviction. He had no 
speculations. He knew He spoke the truth. He held 
not to theory but to great divine facts. No man ever 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 129 

lived or preached well who was in doubt as to what 
he ought to do or say. Life and ministry are more 
than guess-work. The pulpit is not a rostrum for a 
talker, but a high tower from which to tell what the 
preacher knows about the truth that saves. If a man 
has doubts, he is wicked to take them before an audi- 
ence. That is to sow cockle instead of barley. If your 
gospel consists in negatives, neither God nor man has 
any use for you in any parish under the sun. What 
you don't know will make a big book, and will look 
well in gilded rhetoric, but what soul was ever helped 
by what his preacher did not know. "We dismiss the 
doctor when we even suspect he is ignorant, and I 
heartily hope the same fate will befall you if you 
cheat the Lord's heritage with negatives. That most 
intolerant thing known to the Church, namely, "lib- 
eral Christianity," is chiefly negations, and what 
wreck it makes of faith and character. Nothing but 
positive thought and loyal faith in it will commend 
your ministry to needy men and bring about their 
salvation. Believe in your Lord, believe in your Bible, 
believe in your creed, believe in your Church, and men 
will believe in your ministry. 

V. — Our Lord preached the simple gospel. There 
is a gospel not simple. It is swollen and preten- 
tious, inflated by sentiment and weighted by philos- 
ophy. He never used it. Nor did He preach any- 
thing else than the gospel: that is, "good news" to 
sinful men. He had nothing else that would save. 
He did not speak about the truth of the Talmud, or 
the code of Hammurabi, or the Babylonish account of 
the Flood, or the problem of the Maccabean Psalms. 



130 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

He confined himself to the mission on which He had 
been sent, the vital problem of redemption for men. 
The crying weakness of the pulpit in all ages has been 
the proclamation of much not the gospel. Sometimes 
it has been the vapidity of altar forms, sometimes 
the asstheticism of elaborate robes and ritual, some- 
times partisan political fulminations, again it was the 
exploiting of literary culture or some social fad, or 
the vociferous thundering of some outworn creed, or 
the polite moderatism of good works or, most fre- 
quent of all, just the preaching of something or other 
as devoid of moral force as a polyp. It is only fair 
to say that its preachers have not generally given the 
Lord's gospel a fair chance. Cannot you do better? 
You will be in many a tight place for a sermon or for 
something which will draw, but can you not remember 
that there is only one kind of truth in your commis- 
sion? ''Go ye into all the world and preach the 
gospel to every creature." And that is not the 
gospel as Browning puts it, or as Dante incorporates 
it, or as the Pilgrim's Progress has it, modernly illu- 
minated by the stereopticon, or as displayed in Church 
history, or as inflicted on the world in some philosophy 
or other. It is the gospel in New Testament forms, in 
its biblical conception and settings. Nor will you 
find that gospel something that can be blown out of a 
bugle horn, or bellowed in a chorus, or preached from 
the events of the day with any great profit to souls. 
There are discouragements in the way the old forms 
of truth are received, but they have given the gospel 
about all the acceptance it has ever received. Stand 
by the simplicity of the gospel of Christ. 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 131 

VI. — The great Exemplar preached, under the guid- 
ance of the Holy Spirit. He had Him without meas- 
ure, and needed Him even while Himself God. Not a 
word proceeded from Him except as it was given by 
the Holy Ghost. The lesson is obvious — a man can- 
not preach the truth aright unless God the. Spirit 
baptize him with power. When He does that, Evan 
Roberts, the coal miner, can stir the people as His 
instrument far beyond the ability of the average min- 
ister to follow. You should find for yourselves the 
limits of promise of divine aid in your work, and then 
apply to God for the full measure of blessing. So 
will come renewals of Penteeosts under your ministry. 

Young gentlemen, you come of a godly lineage and, 
personally, have an honorable past. Let your future 
be that of consecrated, intelligent, devout, faithful 
ministers of Jesus Christ. Remember your Model and 
study Him. Obey your commission. Keep in touch 
with men. Be loyal to your Church. Depend upon 
divine aid everywhere, and the God of peace and 
power go with you until you come up with all your 
works before Him, and then may the joy be yours to 
hear Him say, ""Well done." 



THE DIGNITY OF THE CHRISTIAN MIN- 
ISTRY 

Dear Brethren of the Class of 1906: 

The rolling of the year has brought the Seminary 
to the end of one period and the commencement of 
another. This is particularly true of yourselves. You 
cease to-night to be students under our care, and 
henceforth are to be engaged in the actual work of 
the ministry. Not the recitation room but the parish 
is to be the scene of your future labors, and in your 
hands will rest all the prerogatives of the sacred min- 
istry of the gospel. It is important that you enter 
upon your work with true and high ideals of your 
calling. Ordination means much, especially to him 
who is divinely guided in his conceptions of the office 
into which by this means he enters. It therefore seems 
fitting to add a last word to earlier instruction upon 
the subject. Our thought clusters about what may be 
called "The Dignity of the Christian Ministry.' ' 

The ministry of the gospel is an office. A man and 
his office are two things. A minister and his ministry 
are not the same. Paul said, ' ' I magnify mine office, ' ' 
I honor my ministry. He was never known to lift up 
Paul for a spectacle. He did not seek Paul but 
Christ. He misconceives himself and his work who 
makes his ordination a vehicle of promotion; in such 
132 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 133 

case the office is not honored but the officer — the man. 
This is to rank the soldier before the banner, and to 
give the servant a place above his master. The Chris- 
tian minister may not magnify himself, but he is 
called to lift up his office on high that men may 
understand the mercy which establishes it on earth, 
and that his Lord may be glorified. 

The Christian ministry is an office of unequaled 
dignity because of the character of its Founder. The 
cry of certain theologians is "Back to Christ/ ' No 
creeds between investigators or the Church and Him. 
"Back to Christ" we go for the order of the New 
Testament bishops. The bishopric is His device. 
Bishops, presbyters, are His officers. We cannot go 
back of Christ for authority or dignity. Christ is 
God. And "when He ascended up on high He gave 
some apostles, and some prophets, and some evangel- 
ists, and some pastors and teachers for the perfecting 
of the saints, for the work of the ministry "; and we 
are, therefore, ambassadors for Christ, as though God 
did beseech men by us. 

The character of the office, its design, field, duties, 
are all from Christ. Its dignity bears close relation 
to the character of the Founder. He is the Majesty 
of Heaven. He is the Intelligence whence the Uni- 
verse has proceeded. He is the Power by which all 
things consist. He is the Love which has shed its 
blood to furnish reconciliation and forgiveness. He 
is the great King and Head of the Church. This 
agency which best reflects Him among men is for the 
dissemination of the knowledge and the dispensing of 
the ordinances of salvation. It partakes of His char- 



134 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

acter. Not as Christ is the fountain of civil govern- 
ment is He the Founder of the office and order of the 
ministry. The one is the order of nature; the other 
is in the line of redeeming love, of grace, that affec- 
tionate outflow from God adapted to restore a lost 
world to His favor and His home. The dignity of the 
Son of God, the majesty He displays in all His work 
of redemption, is moral, sublimely moral. He came 
not to earth in material splendor. His Cross was even 
more sorrowfully destitute of the sensual witchery 
and glamour that seize the mind and heart than the 
manger. "He was a root out of dry ground. " "He 
had no form or comeliness." He had no royal robes. 
His hand held no scepter. And yet the most illustri- 
ous display that God has made of divine character 
was there. 

From that historic lifting up and shining out upon 
the Cross of the Holy One, this ministerial office is 
designed to bring before men visions of His moral 
beauty, His sweetness, tenderness, and mighty power 
to save. From this it derives its dignity. Borrowed 
from the Cross, it is but a reflection of the Christ. 
Where is there true dignity like ambassadorship for 
Him? It is not earth-born and earthly. Even the 
world withholds honors from the Caesar of his time to 
give them to Paul, the tentmaker, who was simply an 
ambassador of the Son of God. 

And do we always remember that the Founder of 
this office was Himself the first occupant? He is the 
Prophet. He made the office for Himself. He admin- 
isters it by admitting such as we. We are subordinate 
prophets, "laborers together with God." That is not 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 135 

a small office which the Master filled at Capernaum, 
on Olivet, and by the ivell at Sychar. Not a syllable 
of the gospel do we preach which did not in substance 
come from His mouth. Not a duty of the pastoral 
office do we discharge whose comprehensive models are 
not found in His loving regard for the children, and 
the compassions displayed in such deeds as feeding 
the thousand and healing the sick. The field you 
enter has been trodden by the feet which the nail 
fastened to the tree; and the lips which cried, 
" I thirst," in the crucifixion hour, were the great- 
est and sweetest preachers that the world will ever 
hear. 

Brethren, the offices of the covenant of grace are 
no mean things. They are the property of the Son of 
God and our Saviour, and are His exhibition of Him- 
self. They rise above the thrones, and principalities, 
and the powers of earth and heaven, and they are 
lustrous and majestic, even though men that are made 
a little lower than the angels enter in as servants of 
Him Who is Lord of all. 

The dignity of the Christian ministry is seen from 
the commission it confers on men. It makes them 
ministers of peace and good-will to a lost and rebel- 
lious world. It authorizes them to stand for God, 
declare His counsel, offer His mercy, expound His 
law, "bind and loose/' or declare the right or wrong, 
and exercise appointed governments. There is even a 
shadowy remnant of the priestly office in the author- 
itative syllables of the benediction which pronounces 
the blessing of the Trinity upon those right with God. 
The man bearing the commission of his Master is His 



136 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

representative. Well has Calvin said, in his com- 
mentary on John, ' ' This is a great and excellent thing 
for men to be set over the Chnrch that they may rep- 
resent the person of the Son of God." We come as 
His ambassadors with richer presents for men than 
were ever carried to barbaric court to buy terms of 
peace. We are a ministry of reconciliation. We pray 
men in Christ's stead to be reconciled to God. They 
are alienated from righteous government and the doc- 
trines and life and fellowship of their Father's house. 
We come to herald a path of return, to proclaim a 
treaty of peace, to publish forgiveness of sins, to urge 
the arguments that God has put into our lips and 
hearts to win our brethren of the flesh to become with 
us the sons of God. So we tell the story of our 
Father 's compassion, our Saviour 's love in His bloody 
passion, His shameful and painful death, His glorious, 
mighty resurrection and entrance into heaven, and His 
gracious purposes, and propositions, and methods that 
He may gather together the children of God that are 
scattered abroad, and bless them with holy, happy life 
eternal. The sum of our message is, "God so loved 
the world that He gave His only begotten Son that 
whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but 
have everlasting life." The message befits ambas- 
sadorship to rebellious provinces of God's empire, to 
hearts that hate God and love war with righteousness, 
and it itself glorifies the office. Nothing else like it 
has sprung from the intelligence and love of God or 
man. It is instinct with the purpose of salvation. It 
glorifies the Book of God, and magnifies the office of 
herald for Christ. It places the minister in charge 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 137 

of immortal souls for their cure, and gives the sacred 
things of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost into their 
keeping. It puts a silver trumpet to their lips which 
makes music to the psalm of life on the continents and 
in the islands of the sea. 

Does the Lord indeed confer this commission on 
men? How runs the Scripture? Certain men are 
called shepherds, overseers, ministers, prophets, stew- 
ards, even angels. We read, "There was a man sent 
from God whose name was John. The same came for 
a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men 
through him might believe." He was the last of the 
old prophets. The same power said to Saul, "I will 
send thee far hence to the Gentiles." And the Holy 
Ghost said, "Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the 
work whereunto I have called them." As distinctly, 
though not always as manifestly, every true incumbent 
of the office of the ministry is called unto it by his 
Lord as were these, or the ancient priests. Very true 
is it that "no man taketh this honor unto himself but 
he that is called of God as was Aaron." So is it 
true that whatever real honor, dignity, the ministry 
possesses to-day is not because of accidental church 
station ; for station is not essential to the honor of the 
office. Nor because of surpassing talents ; for brilliant 
parts are not essential to the office, the Lord be 
praised! Nor on account of extraordinary achieve- 
ments; since deeds are not integral to the office. But 
because the Head of the Church has placed honor- 
able robes upon the sons of the prophets. No man 
has ever brought honor into this office of God except 
the man Christ Jesus Himself. It is greater than 



138 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

man. It finds its superior only in the person of the 
Son of man Who is the Son of God. 

Sometimes false growths arise in the Christian min- 
istry which seem to negative its dignity. One thing 
is a willingness to concede that the Christian min- 
istry stands upon a par with other professional call- 
ings. The preacher who so does secularizes his ideal. 
Other callings are open in a thousand ways to material 
success. They have a grand nobility about them ; but 
after all they belong to the order of the world. Very 
often the largest returns obtained in them are by 
methods and managements distinctly separated from 
the doctrines of the gospel. Never is any success 
worth speaking of reached by the minister on secular 
principles and methods. The Kingdom is not of this 
world, and the servants of God must not fight or dis- 
play other worldly actions; which actions will be not 
only at the expense of their public good name, but 
also will unseat from the favor of Almighty God. 
Years ago a professional neighbor boasted in my pres- 
ence that his profession was as good as mine. Little 
was said in reply, but ever since it has been my grow- 
ing thought that no calling in all the world is essen- 
tially so great and noble as the ministry of redemp- 
tion. The hosts of men left to themselves and to 
secular culture bite and devour one another, while the 
one thing which bids them to better and holier things 
is the gospel of peace and good-will which you are to 
preach until the end. 

Again, the preacher may make his office a pedestal 
from which to glorify himself. He may do this with- 
out meaning it, and grow large in self-esteem, par- 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 139 

ticularly if lie displays talent for his work. There are 
few more obnoxious fellows than those whose sense 
of talent dominates their consecration in the preach- 
ing of the gospel. Conscious self-seeking, or uncon- 
scious for that matter, disintegrates the message of 
salvation and poisons the fragments. Young men of 
gifts are liable to this snare. Older men often come 
to the end of themselves by the whippings of Provi- 
dence and by the gracious strivings of the Spirit in 
their hearts. Happy is the man who begins his min- 
istry aright in these matters. 

Sometimes false record is made through a feeling 
that the office, and hence the officer, is superior to the 
strenuous pressure laid upon other callings. The 
student forgets his books as do many men in other 
vocations, and people find it out. 

The eye of the taskmaster seems essential to in- 
dustry. You will find that profundity in the pulpit 
is rarely dangerous, while attenuation of the purest 
gold may be carried to treacherous thinness. A pastor 
about to take a voyage was accosted by his parish- 
ioner with this remark, ' ' doctor, are you not afraid 
to sail out on the wide, wide seal" He replied with 
a twinkle, "It's not the wideness that troubles me, 
but the deepness of the sea!" And is it not possible, 
young men, that some ministers may dread the depths 
of the gospel and devote themselves to the common- 
places of their message? Remember that the founda- 
tions of the temple of truth go down deep wherever 
it is securely built. They take hold on God, and on 
the Cross of His Son, and Eternity, and Immortality, 
and the Everlasting Covenant, and the Judgment Day. 



140 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

Another deflection into which the young minister is 
often betrayed is ambitious imaginations about the 
congregation of monied and social power. A young 
fellow dreams of a parish of culture, and cleverness, 
and pecuniary ease. Nothing could be worse for him 
than to early reach this ideal. Rich Christians are 
by no means to be despised. Many are most delight- 
ful characters. But the parish described is not the 
Master's ideal. His model parishes were found in 
the by-ways and hedges, in the streets and lanes of 
the city, among the common people who were en- 
grossed in the sordid business of making a living, yet 
heard Him gladly. A man cannot measure pastoral 
success by the bank account of his people, their high 
social grade, the number of college and professional 
men in his audience, or his own social rank arising 
therefrom. Secular tests furnish no standard for cor- 
rect judgment of a powerful pastorate. Neither do 
they insure the Master's plaudit, "Well done." 

Sometimes men have ambition to be known as learned 
preachers, and perhaps as wielding elegant pens. A 
man whose ministry idealizes literary style does not 
greatly reach the souls of men. A passion for letters 
and mere thinking may shear one of his power. 

Inspiration is not dipped out of the ink bottle, and 
figures of speech go but a small way in setting forth 
the true dignity of a gospel preacher. Style is sec- 
ond, heart is first. Letters are vehicles; doctrines of 
grace are the substance. Truth comes before rhetoric, 
and the highest dignity the minister can attain is to 
get a message from God which will reach the hearts of 
men. 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 141 

But on the other hand, is there nothing of honor 
about an office which is securing, though slowly, along 
with such agencies as the eldership and the great con- 
gregation, a regenerate world? Is there no dignity 
about the chief means of hasting the day of the com- 
ing of the Lord and of the new heavens and new 
earth wherein shall dwell righteousness? What sur- 
passing honor to minister a gospel that reveals the 
character of God, uncovers men before themselves, en- 
forces the rules of correct living, plants new impulses 
in the heart, ameliorates conditions of human suffer- 
ing, brings new birth to the nations, lifts the heart 
toward divine things, unveils a star of hope in a 
future state, and brings a multitude through a happy, 
triumphant death home to God and to the crown of 
life which fades not away! What surpassing honor! 
This is not the office of angels, but of men. It is not 
rivaled by anything on the earth or in the skies. 
Its faithful discharge is attended with promises of 
everlasting honor. "They that turn many to right- 
eousness shall shine as the stars forever and ever." 
"He that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit 
unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he 
that reapeth may rejoice together." May you and I 
be faithful to our office by maintaining and preaching 
the truth, by keeping consciences void of offense, by 
holding to the Great Head, by serving men for 
Christ's sake and for the brotherhood of the race, 
so that when we are called away the Church left 
behind, and the Church on high, and the Great 
Priest and Prophet and King, the Master of As- 
semblies, shall say, " Well done, good and faithful 



142 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

servants," and on our heads shall be placed the 
crown. 

"Now the God of Peace, that brought again from 
the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the 
sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, 
make you perfect in every good work to do His will, 
working in you that which is well pleasing in His 
sight, through Jesus Christ, to Whom be glory for- 
ever and ever. Amen." 



REMINDERS 

Deae Brethren of the Class op 1907: 

' ' Time and tide wait for no man, ' ' and borne upon 
them we have been swept almost without our knowl- 
edge upon our course of life until we have reached 
this commencement occasion. It is not so long ago 
since you conned your first lesson in school, and now 
you are here having completed your college and sem- 
inary courses and are ready for our diploma. It was 
only yesterday we first said to you, "We are glad to 
see you enter the Seminary/' and to-night we say, 
' ' Good-by. ' ' Will you not permit us to add a parting 
message ? 

You are in numbers one of the smallest classes sent 
out from this Seminary for many years. But that is 
not your fault, nor does it detract from your personal 
merit. You would be larger if you could. This is a 
case where even a Calvinist would say that ability 
limits responsibility. We trust and believe your lack 
of numbers will be compensated for by the magnitude 
of your services. It is orthodox and not uncompli- 
mentary to say that if Providence had need of any 
more of precisely your sort he would have put them 
into your class. It can be truly said of you that you 
have shown yourselves talented, discreet, studious, and 
teachable young men, who are qualified to preach the 
truth; and that we send you forth in the confidence 
143 



144 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

that the great Head of the Church will honor your 
ministry. 

There are two or three things we wish to call to 
mind before you go: 

I. — You come of honorable lineage. Racially it is 
Scotch and Scotch-Irish, and nobody can have better 
blood than that. It is not often royal blue, but it is 
royal red. It has iron in it. It is iron that has taken 
hold on steel many a time in the cause of God and man. 
It is the blood that makes presidents and from which 
many great preachers have sprung. It is patriot blood 
everywhere, whether we speak of the commonwealth 
or the republic of God. Your racial descent is a good 
beginning. But the lineage I especially mean is that 
of the saints. You come of a godly ancestry. It is an 
honorable start in life to be born on a good social 
grade. It is vastly more important to your career in 
both the worlds which are to compass your activities 
as immortals that you are born in the historic line of 
the new birth. For generations your ancestors have 
been intelligent in the truth and vital in piety. Your 
veins carry the blood and your bodies bear the seal 
of the covenant. You come of the most thoughtful, 
and thorough, and well-balanced section of the Prot- 
estant Reformation. Your line inherits more of value 
than any other body of living men, and you will be 
wise and valuable, and perhaps even great men, if 
you comprehend and practice the genius of your in- 
heritance. 

But the lineage I most especially refer to in speak- 
ing to you as prospective ministers is that of your 
ministry. You have no cause to be ashamed of John 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 145 

Knox, Andrew Melville, Alexander Henderson, An- 
drew Eenwiek, the Erskines, Ralph and Ebenezer, 
and their company of "Marrow men," of the Ander- 
sons, Presslys, Kerrs, Coopers, Clarks, Wallaces, and 
Youngs, and time would fail to tell of all the Gideons, 
Samsons, Jephthahs, Davids, Samuels, and others, who 
through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteous- 
ness, and obtained promises. You have a clerical an- 
cestry fitting to excite a holy pride. Some of these 
men framed historic covenants and creeds for the 
honor of Christ's crown; some went to the martyr's 
death singing psalms; others planted the pure gospel 
in the new world ; and all have preached the truth with 
faithfulness and power, whether in obscure or high 
stations. In their lines stands your Seminary, which 
probably has had no superior on the continent or in 
Christendom in the practical quality of the workmen 
sent into the field, which is the world. You are the 
latest in the long line. You are compassed about by a 
cloud of witnesses. You have a lofty standard set 
you. Gather inspiration from this ancestral past, and 
become worthy members of this great company which 
has gone into all the world as publishers of the good 
news. 

II. — We wish to remind you that you have suffi- 
cient training for your work. It has not been given on 
the artificial and pedantic lines of minute and dis- 
qualifying criticism, too often subjective and fanciful 
to the extreme. Nor has it been in the scattered and 
attenuated width which makes theological learning a 
veneer or a varnish. We have held that there are 
enough sinew and marrow studies and principles to 



146 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

take all the time in which the Church has placed you 
under our care. Of these the aim has been to give 
you a working knowledge. By no means have you 
fully mastered them. But you have fairly entered 
their field, and there is no reason outside yourselves 
why you should not obtain a more comprehensive 
grasp, and you doubtless will. The aim of your course 
has been to make you preachers and not technical 
scholars. You have scholarship enough, and of the 
right kind, to enable you to preach well. You will 
preach better as you become more proficient in knowl- 
edge and method. But rest assured your good preach- 
ing will be on the general lines of your seminary 
course. It will not be done amid the fluctuating 
mazes of criticism, or the confusions of doubt about 
the Scriptures, or the novel things of the day, or the 
scorched and barren and dead heresies of the past 
galvanized by captivating literature into the sem- 
blance of living things, or in carpings about creeds. 
There is nothing vital in such matters, for yourselves 
or your people. The farther you get from the great 
things you have been taught, the less need will God 
or man have for you in the pulpit. We do not expect 
your departure, but we wish you to have hearty con- 
fidence in the fund of knowledge in your possession, 
and to hold up your heads because you are United 
Presbyterian ministers of the righteousness of God. 
Do not think other culture would better qualify for 
ministering. It would be a weakness instead. No 
class of men go out with equipment superior for 
practical work. If you wish to enter other lines 
of study, we offer no discouragement. Beware, how- 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 147 

ever, lest they impoverish you as heralds of salva- 
tion. 

The latest and one of the most foolish clerical 
novels is entitled, ' ' The Ministry of David Baldwin. ' ' 
It describes the experiences of a young theologian who 
leaves the seminary to enter upon the duties of his 
first parish. He sets himself to exploit what he calls 
"The New Theology. " He seems to deal largely in 
difficult theological problems, and usually without 
much regard to the historic faith of the Church. He 
gets into oceans of trouble, at which he is astonished, 
and for which he finds great fault with certain mem- 
bers of his parish. Of course he only reaps what he 
has sown. Any man who handles theological prob- 
lems chiefly, and in an off-colored way, may expect 
to pay the penalty. The Church loves orthodoxy, al- 
though she is perfectly willing to have it presented 
in modern dress. But she likes and longs for the 
more practical elements of the great salvation. The 
legend over the pulpit is not to be "Nuts to Crack"; 
they are hard on the preacher's teeth and difficult 
of digestion by the congregation; but rather, "The 
Truth of God : Forbearance in Love. ' ' 

What right has the pulpit to discuss questions of 
evolution or the virgin birth of our Lord before the 
average congregation. They are all well enough in 
doctrinal treatises or upon academic occasions, hut 
only the novice or crank or heretic (which in these 
days is generally synonymous with crank) will ped- 
dle them out to people whose crying need is more 
instruction about justification, adoption, and such 
like themes of the old-fashioned gospel. A high 



148 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

ambition for each of you is to be not like David 
Baldwin in your ministry. The Church has small 
need for such in her length and breadth. Occasionally 
in the great cities such men will serve well enough 
for purposes of ventilation and to show how things 
are not to be done, but whoever heard of revivals at- 
tending such ministry or a devout church growing 
up under it? Of course we expect you to keep clear 
of all such things. 

III. — You go out to the noblest work upon the 
planet. Compared with it politics is dirt, money get- 
ting is emptiness, and making a name for oneself is 
but hollow selfishness. Even those who open up the 
world by the devices of civilization but follow the 
track blazed by a self-denying ministry, which goes 
out through the earth to build a highway for the 
King. You are to be heralds of the coming One as 
truly as was John the forerunner. None have so ex- 
alted a position among men as they who go before the 
Lord and speak in His name. Let two things guide 
and comfort you : 

(a) You are following in the footsteps of your 
Master. He came to preach as well as to atone. You 
cannot do the latter if you would. Besides, He has 
done all that God requires. But you can be fellows 
with Him in His ministry. You are to be prophets 
speaking for the great Prophet, and His messages are 
to be yours. What honor to be mouthpieces for your 
God! What surpassing honor to be members of a 
company of spokesmen of which He is the head, and 
thus ambassadors of the great King ! 

(b) You are sent upon the most benevolent errand 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 149 

known to the annals of moral government — the re- 
claiming of a lost world. So far as we know, this 
is the mightiest and most love-inspiring thought of 
God. It is the chief est warrant for the declaration, 
' ' God is love. ' ' Your message and mission are nearest 
the heart of the Most High. Their nature should 
exclude the operation of selfish motives. If you prove 
truly Christlike ministers, they will be absent from 
your service. Your hearts should find impulse and 
comfort in the persuasion that such love as Christ 
felt constrains you ; and thus you will be lifted above 
the plane of the selfish scrambles of human life and 
the emptiness of an existence bounded only by per- 
sonal considerations. Living thus outside of self, you 
may constantly regard yourselves as citizens and 
workmen approved in the kingdom of God. 

IV. — I wish to remind you that there is in store an 
exceeding great reward. This is the Master's doing. 
He Himself labored in view of the joy set before Him, 
and He holds it before you. You may become par- 
takers of this joy. The like of this is not even hinted 
at in any other calling, except as it personally com- 
bines with the redemptive mission of the Son of God. 
The conquest of nature, the harnessing of its forces, 
the development of philosophy, the discovery and use 
of the lines of beauty and tones of harmony, the enter- 
prises of commerce mean nothing ultimately to the 
race except they join themselves to the Cross. In 
themselves, comforts, and culture, and material con- 
quest have no moral or spiritual redemption for sinful 
men. They may even be the ministers of sin. They 
must be sanctified by the blood of the everlasting 



150 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

covenant, ere they can contribute to even moral worth. 
These are days when mechanics, ethics, aesthetics ab- 
sorb a growing multitude. Yet they set no joy before 
any workman who ignores the Great Sacrifice. In 
many hands the ordinary vocations of life pay loyal 
tribute to the Redeemer. But your calling is office 
work for Him. It is the one which your Lord pursued 
in the days when He preached His own salvation. 
And your reward will be great if you are faithful, for 
is it not written : ' ' They that turn many to righteous- 
ness shall shine as the stars forever and ever?" 
Every man true to his trust will obtain eternal bless- 
ing. But special opportunities are given to ministers 
to keep near Him, to know His will, to do His favorite 
work, and to grow in His likeness ; and they have pros- 
pect of eternal rulership over many things in that 
world where the flesh is not in honor, and the world is 
not in dominion, and God, and His gospel, and His 
spiritual service will occupy the attention and the 
energies forever. It is written : ' l Take heed unto thy- 
self, and to thy doctrine; continue in them; for in 
doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that 
hear thee"; "and when the Chief Shepherd shall 
appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth 
not away." 

Young brethren, preach the faith once delivered to 
the saints without cloud upon your head or heart, and 
do it in the spirit of the great Prophet, and you shall 
hear Him say, "Well done, good and faithful servant, 
enter into the joy of your Lord!" 



THE ALLEGIANCE OF THE GOSPEL 
MINISTER 

Dear Brethren of the Class of 1908: 

It is probably no mistake to say that students of 
theology are largely absorbed in the intellectual and 
material problems presented to their minds. 

Great questions of doctrine loom up from the ho- 
rizon to the zenith. Such questions as the Inspiration 
of the Word of God, the Person of Our Redeemer, 
the Atonement of the Cross, problems of the Last 
Things, the Canon of Scripture, the hermeneutics of 
both Testaments, the great facts of Church History, 
and the gospel sermon of the preacher, dominate their 
minds. Men of your age in the ministry commonly 
give close heed to the rules of preaching and present 
very polished products to the congregations. They 
are cast in mechanical moulds, and are often not very 
replete with spiritual power. They are mostly ser- 
mons made to order. They are used chiefly to win 
pastoral settlements, and so full are they of the best 
brain work of the preachers that they wonder in 
some cases why they do not capture the congregations 
while the work of some others more readily does. 
They are polished pocket pieces, and will at least go 
off in explosions. The sober fact is that most students 
of theology still need to wait and seek for the baptism 
151 



152 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

of the Spirit in order to full equipment for the con- 
version of sinners and edification of saints. The 
Master says, "Tarry ye in Jerusalem until ye be en- 
dued with power from on high." That invitation 
may well point to the need of the young minister of 
all ages of the Church. 

Then, again, a consideration of material things lays 
profound hold upon the average young preacher. The 
per diem cuts a considerable figure with him. He 
must needs have it to live. So also he must look 
toward a settlement as a pastor; hence questions of 
salary arise, and a parsonage big enough for two, 
for "a bishop must be the husband of one wife." 
Thoughts of such material matters are unavoidable, 
and are not incompatible with the highest spiritual 
purposes of his ministry. 

In view of these facts it seems good to canvass again 
somewhat the essential genius of the Christian min- 
istry ; hence the topic to-night may be stated as ' ' The 
Allegiance of the Gospel Minister." 

I. — The minister must have devotion to a great 
Person. Above all things is God. Jesus Christ is 
God. He is God manifest in the flesh. The heart of 
the gospel is the deity of the Saviour of men. It is 
not enough to ascribe divinity to Him. That term has 
been spoiled by heresy. It does not account Him as 
belonging to absolute Godhead. Yet on the doctrine 
of His deity depends any proper conception of atone- 
ment for lost sinners. It is not enough to esteem 
Him our exemplar. We are to believe and preach that 
He made satisfactory atonement for those whom the 
Father hath given Him. Thomas in astonishment 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 153 

cried when the Master bade him put his finger in the 
wounds, "My Lord and my God." Peter cried when 
under the Master's searching catechism, "Thou know- 
est all things ; Thou knowest that I love Thee. ' ' These 
loyal hearts prefigure the cry of all followers of Christ 
who come after them. It is not enough to have feel- 
ings of loyalty to His cause. There must also be affec- 
tionate regard for His person. He is a person. He 
is the Son of man. He is the Son of God. He is our 
bounteous Providence. He is our dear Redeemer. He 
is the Captain of our Salvation. All true religion 
clusters about His person. His doctrines are but steps 
around His throne. Deism offers us but the abomina- 
tion of desolation with respect to all spiritual good. 
Theism is but little better in matters of salvation. 
They postulate no Redeemer. They have no love for 
God's Son, not knowing Him as the personal expres- 
sion of the Godhead. The whole scheme of redemp- 
tion is but the unfolding of the personal character of 
God as incarnated through Mary the Virgin of Beth- 
lehem. We trust, therefore, that you lay hold as men 
and ministers strongly and vitally on this great Cap- 
tain of Whom we speak, and may it be yours to find 
a hungry and increasing affection for the Man of 
Calvary as the years go by, whether you preach in 
India, Egypt, or the Sudan, or in quiet parishes in 
the home land. Did you ever experience such love 
as made you agonize in the endeavor to embrace His 
knees and even to kiss His feet and to feel that the 
great argument for doing service was simply this, 
"only for Jesus' sake'"? In my first parish a mem- 
ber of the congregation set the matter clearly forth 



154 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

as lie sat on top of a load of coal which he had brought 
to the parsonage. I said something about Christian 
character, I forget what, but I remember what he 
said : ' ' A Christian is first and always a Christ-man ; 
he belongs to Him"; and that is true. And so Paul 
was right when he wrote down in blackest ink, legible 
through all the ages, ' ' for ye are bought with a price, 
and ye are not your own ; therefore ye are to glorify 
God in your bodies and spirits which are His." 
Brethren, remember your fealty. Preach the gospel 
out of hearts of flame for the Lover of your souls as 
long as He continues you in the ministry. 

II. — He must have devotion to the great Book. It 
was Sir Walter Scott, himself a maker of great books, 
who said on his dying bed to Mr. Lockhart, his son- 
in-law, "Read to me a little while." "What shall I 
read 1 ' ' said Mr. Lockhart. " ! the Bible, of course ; 
there is no other book." This great revelation of 
God to man has sunken deep into the hearts of God's 
people since given, and has been the sole guide from 
this world to the other. I think it was Henry Rogers, 
in his book called "The Eclipse of Faith," a mighty 
book, but now almost forgotten, who declared that if 
all the copies of the Bible were destroyed, still there 
might be gathered from the minds of God's people 
an unbroken volume true in every detail. So deeply 
had it penetrated into their souls. This witness is 
true, and if true in the low ebb of religion at that 
time, how much more so in these days of Bible dis- 
tribution, Bible reading, and Bible schools? Nothing 
like it has been known in previous times. Wickedness 
abounds, and the love of many waxes cold, yet the 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 155 

Word of God has found its way into the hearts of 
the present generation. As long as this continues the 
kingdom is safe. Most people, notwithstanding the 
shouting heresies, believe in its inspiration in a plenary 
way. This faith you are to foster and cherish. You 
are not to pay much attention to these severer critics, 
for they have little truth to communicate, but to con- 
tinue to hold the best thought of your Church as to 
the inspiration of the Book and the truthfulness and 
value of its contents. It is very easy getting off the 
track, and occasionally one of our number gets on the 
down grade, threatening from all appearances his gen- 
eral smash-up by and by. No man can stand upright 
before the Lord while picking endless flaws in His 
Book, and so sending it forth shorn in the presence 
of the congregation of much of its impressive power. 
To succeed as a Christian minister one must have 
simple faith, a simple manner, a simple sermon that 
the people can understand. They wish fundamental 
instruction and comfort, much comfort for their souls. 
These blessings must arise from simple methods of 
study, with the heart open "to hear what God the 
Lord will speak.' ' Your speaker has been tossed up 
and down in Adria with critical books for compan- 
ions, and his testimony is not to their advantage. To 
take, for example, the books by the Smiths. There 
is George Adam Smith telling us how to preach the 
Old Testament after he had taken out its heart, and 
Henry Preserved Smith with his Introduction to the 
Old Testament, and W. Eobertson Smith, with his two 
volumes. These are very brainy men, but they are 
chargeable with smiting the Saviour in the house of 



156 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

His friends. No man can sympathetically read and 
study this kind of literature without feeling the worse 
for it. He will dwell in the atmosphere of frost, his 
love will wax cold simply because God does not ap- 
prove such misconceptions of Himself, of His Book, 
of His Church, of His Son. 

Misconceptions of Scripture come very easy for any 
one. One of the most ludicrous I have heard arose 
in conversation between some lay members of the 
Church, in which one said, "It was a good thing our 
first parents ate the forbidden fruit. If they had not, 
we all would have been born blind, because the Bible 
says, 'When they ate the fruit their eyes were 
opened. ' ' ' This was a mistake of ignorance, but there 
are many misconceptions of the teachings of the Book 
where ignorance cannot be blamed, but rather specu- 
lation undeterred by reverence. As, for example, the 
notion that Abraham is not historical, that the story 
of Samson was a solar myth, that the resurrection 
of Jesus Christ was an illusion. From such profan- 
ities turn thou away. Where the Book is being 
doubted no good preaching is possible, and coldness 
towards divine things fairly freezes up the congre- 
gation. 

To each of you let me say, "Preach the Word," 
the Word that has guided the Church thus far in her 
conquest of the world, the unadulterated, unimpover- 
ished, all-powerful Word which is the sword of the 
Spirit of the living God. All spiritually successful 
ministry in the gospel has been by men who have re- 
ceived the Bible as the oracles of God, and the course 
of your history must also be along this highway of 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 157 

the King, if at the end you be not overtaken with 
much sorrow. An old saying runs thus, "Beware of 
the man of one book/' I trust in your case this 
volume will be the Bible. Be ye searchers of the 
Scriptures, and please remember your best use of the 
volume will not consist in carrying it around town 
under the arm. Better still, have it deeply inshrined 
in your heart. 

III. — Devotion to a great Kingdom. This is the 
kingdom of God. You are under bonds to serve the 
King in His kingdom, and that not as free lances, but 
with instruments, weapons, and proclamations ap- 
pointed by the King. There are still some who think 
that the Church is the whole kingdom of God. A 
better thought is that this kingdom is the dominion 
of grace and salvation in the earth, with all the prin- 
ciples, instruments, agencies, and persons bound up 
therein. It was begun on earth and will be consum- 
mated in heaven. The Church of God is certainly a 
most important part of the kingdom. It is the pillar 
and ground of the truth wherever men are concerned. 
There are two phases of this dominion which are com- 
monly described as religious and secular. In all 
phases of these, the King's gospel and the King's law 
have the right of way. We are to serve the King in 
both aspects. While religion is chiefly to occupy your 
ministry, you will have duties toward the secular life 
of men, as expressed, for example, in the State. John 
B. Gough served the kingdom in matters of temper- 
ance. Abraham Lincoln likewise served the kingdom 
in his great proclamation, freeing millions of men. 
And these, and such as these, are truly servants of 



158 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

the most high God, even though they never mounted 
the pulpit stairs. A double line of duty is upon 
you, the obligation to serve God and men in both 
features of His kingdom as demand may arise. 

Loyalty to the kingdom will generally lead to faith- 
ful service in the Church denomination in which we 
have a part, and which we have received "to have 
and to hold" from our fathers. It is often very un- 
wise to stir up contentions on such matters as denomi- 
national disintegration and obliteration. As to Church 
union, it should be a matter of slow growth and thor- 
ough ripeness before it is undertaken. If it comes 
by the manifest hand of Providence, well and good, 
and may the Lord hasten the time ; but otherwise it is 
likely to be a source of heart burnings and sorrow. 
Dr. Alexander Young used to say " that those who 
carve for Providence are apt to cut their own fingers. ' ' 
It is truly doubtful if one can better serve the Master 
in the organically united Church of great size than 
in the smaller organization, which, though small, yet 
gives plenty of room to the most remarkable genius. 
To you and to students of former classes let it be said, 
conservatism should govern all steps toward any type 
of Church union and the probable loss of the special 
heritage of doctrine and practice which God has given 
us to enjoy. The spirit of unity will not come by the 
sounding horn and the floating banner, in short by a 
campaign, but as "Hermon's dew, the dew that doth 
on Zion 's hill descend ' ' ; that is, by the quiet leadings 
of the Holy Ghost. 

And now, brethren, what shall I say more? Time 
would fail to say all that is in our hearts for you. 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 159 

We wish you well, we wish you to be well, we wish 
you to do well in the kingdom of God according to 
the gospel of the kingdom and under the governorship 
of Him Who reveals the love of God to perishing 
sinners and writes it down for all the ages, until the 
Church of all time shall rise up to see Him face to 
face and hear Him say, "Well done, good and faith- 
ful servant; enter into the joy of your Lord/' And 
"now the God of peace Who brought again from the 
dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep 
through the blood of the everlasting covenant^ make 
you perfect in every good work to do His will, work- 
ing in you that which is well pleasing in His sight, 
through Jesus Christ; to Whom be glory for ever 
and ever. Amen." 



QUALIFICATIONS FOR THE GOSPEL 
MINISTRY 

Dear Brethren of the Class op 1909 : 

One of the sad things in colonizing the earth is the 
separation of friends and often the breaking of hearts. 
Yet the earth was given to man to subdue it. There- 
fore Abraham went out not knowing whither he went. 
He was to begin settlements of the Kingdom. Evan- 
gelist Robertson's sermon on "Abraham, the Come- 
across," depends on the pathos of emigration for its 
power. Our own immediate ancestors give us tearful 
illustrations of the sorrows of parting. Scotland and 
Ireland have sent out their children in great armies, 
leaving in most instances the old folks at home. In 
the vast majority of cases there was to be no reunion, 
and they all knew it. Children were sent out who 
were scarcely acquainted with their parents, and life 
became largely a scene of introductions and fare- 
wells. 

Every parting of friends falls into the same train 
as these we have just described, but few are touched 
with so pungent sorrow. You have somewhat learned 
this already, although but young in years. We have 
come to a sort of parting of the ways to-night, and 
there is a mixture of gladness and of regret that it is 
so. We have known you to love you, and we trust we 
160 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 161 

are not without a place in your hearts. It is needless 
to say that we will miss you, but our feelings are 
tempered by the knowledge that the errand which 
takes you from us is the ministry of the gospel through 
the blood of reconciliation by Jesus Christ our Lord. 

It is fitting therefore that something be said which 
shall magnify this mission and somewhat help you in 
your coming work. Our theme therefore is, ' ' Qualifi- 
cations for the Gospel Ministry/ ' not all of them by 
any means, but some gathered up here and there. 

I. — Certain qualifications that are greatly over- 
estimated : 

(1) Absorbing engrossment in the spirit of the 
times. Of course a man and a minister should not 
wholly disregard these phenomena. They are the 
orderings of Providence. What a minister should do 
is to recognize and accept them so far as they seem 
to him to be true, but he should remember that for 
his purposes they contain only a grain or two of wheat 
and a bushel of chaff. The spirit of these times is not 
theologically constructive, but irreverent, smart, and 
iconoclastic, and certainly it does not care much for 
creeds and not very much for the Book. It is specu- 
lative and adventurous and exceedingly intolerant, 
especially of accepted truth. It does not so much re- 
gard God as it does the creature, and has many acute 
and brilliant things to say. But on the whole it is 
not the stuff for the pulpit and the parish. It has 
settled nothing and does not seem to have much 
prospect of so doing in the future. In theology, in 
particular, its findings are exceedingly unsatisfactory. 
It has caught up a lot of ancient heresies which the 



162 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

Church has aforetime "spewed out of her mouth," 
and has unsettled the faith of many. I do not think 
it unwise to say that the thought about reconstruct- 
ing theology is not born of wisdom. The funda- 
mentals of the gospel are severely plain and can toler- 
ate no reconstruction. Calvinism and Arminianism 
are likely to stand where they are, Calvinism, because 
of its loyalty to the Bible, and Arminianism, because 
it rationalizes that Book and so commends itself to a 
certain class of minds. Pelagianism will continue 
because it flatters a sinful human nature and will 
always have its followers, and cast tones and shades 
upon the real theological systems. But when the Holy 
Ghost takes the Pelagian in hand, he is pretty apt to 
lose his vocation. There can be no considerable mix- 
ture of these three into one. 

You agree with me that there is but one gospel for 
all the times of men on the earth. Like its Founder, 
it is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. It is 
superior to all men and to all schools of thought. In- 
terpretations do not change it. It is founded on the 
blood of the Son of God, and all its messages are 
concerning the great salvation. And it meets the 
heartbreaking wants of all ages. 

(2) Another overestimated qualification is tolera- 
tion of men and things that tend to vitiate the gospel. 
Not everything is to be welcomed that enters the field 
of religious thought. As of old men cry, "Lo, here 
is Christ!" and "Lo, there!" Go ye not after them. 
"Sweetness and light" in religion may satisfy Mat- 
thew Arnold, but we are witnesses for the truth, and 
dogma therefore is fundamental. Hard thinking and 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 163 

plain propositions are a first duty. Heaven and hell 
are both parts of the Saviour 's message to men. They 
are both mighty facts. Doctrines must underlie your 
preaching, and necessarily stand in antagonism to 
other views. Remember, nothing new is to be accepted 
until it has finally proven its right to stand in the 
faith of the Christian soul. Theology is intensely con- 
servative and cannot endure light and flippant deal- 
ings with itself or its Book, Mrs. Sarah Robbins, 
in her delightful volume, ' ' Old Andover Days, ' ' tells 
this story about a young theologian and his appetite 
for sweetness. The student's table was bountifully 
supplied with molasses, of which he was inordinately 
fond. He ate so liberally of the treacle as to fall sick 
and need a doctor. When Esculapius came, after the 
fashion of the times he undertook to bleed him, but 
all he could get was a little dribble of molasses. Mrs. 
Robbins says she does not believe the story. I do not 
believe it myself, and I am sure you do not be- 
lieve it either. But it serves to point the moral and 
adorn the tale concerning the minister's sweetness. 
He may be so sweet as to vitiate the tenor of his 



II. — Qualifications which are often underestimated, 
and these are, by far, more real and vital than those 
we have mentioned : 

(1) A growing knowledge of God, — not a grow- 
ing knowledge about God, but an increasing under- 
standing of the Divine character and purposes and 
works. A gentleman at the table some time ago raised 
this question about a gifted minister. One had said 
something about his brilliant talents, another about 



164 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

his social gifts, and another prophesied great things 
for his ministry, when this gentleman capped the 
series of remarks with the query, "Does he know 
God?" This is the chief thing in a good minister's 
equipment. 

Much is taught concerning God in the theistic argu- 
ments. You are acquainted with the argument for 
God from the universe. It sets forth the idea of 
power. The argument from design presents us God 
as intelligence. The moral argument shows us the 
moral Governor. The a priori argument gathers the 
idea of God from the human soul. The Biblical argu- 
ment binds all these in one. But all combined teach 
us only about God. The argument from experience 
of God is necessary to show us Himself. A man must 
needs be converted and be under the tuition of the 
Holy Ghost to really know and understand Him. 
■ ' This is life eternal that we know Him, the only true 
God, and Jesus Christ Whom He has sent. " It is the 
soul doing business with God in the name of His Son 
that obtains a true knowledge of His character, and a 
profound understanding of His being. It comes into 
sympathy with Him and often does not need to be 
told by external revelation of God's thoughts and 
plans, since the Interpreter dwells in his heart. His 
transformed character is in touch with the Most High. 
For example, increasing knowledge of the goodness of 
God settles the question of universal infant salvation ; 
the eternal loss of a helpless babe is felt to be out 
of harmony with the Divine nature. Acquaintance 
with God is the final solvent of such difficult questions 
as assurance of personal salvation, the limits of prayer, 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 165 

questions of doubtful amusements, human slavery, 
and a host of other's. 

(2) A second qualification is the indwelling of the 
Holy Ghost. He is promised to those who ask for 
Him in the right spirit, and we are commanded to be 
filled with the Holy Spirit. A good deal of the con- 
troversy has arisen about the infilling of the Spirit 
for special service, and all are not persuaded that it 
is taught in the Word. Nevertheless the Keswick 
School stands essentially for a great truth. It is that 
we must have grace proportioned to our work. The 
work of the ministry is great, and great grace is re- 
quired for its discharge. The constant cry of the 
ministry is to be, "Oh, my God, give me the Holy 
Spirit for my work. It is Thy work also. Grant me 
the Holy Ghost." No man will succeed in winning 
souls by reliance upon the ordinances, even the preach- 
ing of the Word, although he is commanded to em- 
ploy these agencies. 

He must speak out of a pure heart and a knowing 
one, and in a conscious dependence upon God. AVhat- 
ever your thought may be, young brethren, about the 
infilling of the Spirit for service, it is very sure the 
preacher must be managed by the Spirit as His mouth- 
piece, or the preaching will be cold as a stone. The 
Spirit of God must lead the van and inspire the mes- 
sage. The most impossible thing a man can under- 
take to do in this world is to preach well without the 
Divine Spirit. Salvation is not a natural product, 
but is supernatural; preaching must have its super- 
natural features to succeed. 

(3) Faith in the gospel as God's message to lost 



166 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

men. This is to say that the preacher's message must 
be believed by the preacher, or his hearers will not 
believe it. It is the instrument divinely appointed to 
save sinners. It does not work by magic, but as prop- 
erly employed to reach the end in view. One cannot 
say in effect, "Do not believe as I do; believe as I 
tell you ' ' : but, with the apostle, be able to say, ' ' We 
believe and therefore we speak.' ' Faith by the min- 
ister is quite as important as preaching by the min- 
ister, or faith by the hearer. Faith should char- 
acterize our lives everywhere, and not least when we 
stand up to preach. A real expectation of blessing 
on every sermon will do a great part in clothing the 
message with power. If tempted to preach simply to 
fulfil a duty, the work can be naught else but feeble. 
One great element of strength is believing what God 
promises to those who trust in His Word. Believing 
preachers will win congregations to believe. 

(4) A fourth qualification is prayer. There has 
been a great revival of the spirit of prayer in the 
Church in the last few years. God be thanked ! May 
it increase and may you all be caught up on its wings 
before God. Our Lord prayed continuously. He 
chose His apostles in a night of prayer, He filled the 
garden with the notes of prayer, He baptized His 
Cross for us by the breathings of prayer. He died 
praying. What a blessed death! What an inspira- 
tion His prayers to His followers! Paul prayed 
everywhere he went and hungrily besought prayers 
of his friends for a blessing upon his gospel. The 
New Testament is full of records of prayers and so 
are the accounts of the Church of all time. They 



PASTORAL HOMILIES 167 

prayed in the Holy Ghost, Luther three hours at a 
stretch, Welch until his knees became callous upon 
the hard floors. And so it has been wherever the 
Church or the man has obtained much power from 
God. In many particulars it is a mystery. Who 
of us knows its limits? And yet who of all of us 
does not recognize its power? Dr. Gregg has well 
said, "Nothing lies beyond the reach of prayer ex- 
cept that which lies outside of the will of God." It 
has been the refuge, armory, and solace of the soul 
ever since God said to the human heart, "I am thy 
Father. ' ' May it be so with you in everything — your 
health, your books, your study, your parish work, 
your guidance of others, your guidance of yourself, 
your temporal support, your preaching, your holy 
living, and, by and by, dying in the faith once de- 
livered to the saints. 

I charge you to begin your ministry as men of much 
believing prayer, and that you will never fall short 
in your engagements at the throne of grace. Follow 
the Master, that you may have tokens of power in all 
your life and work, and believe what the Master 
taught when He said, ' ' Ask and ye shall receive, seek 
and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto 
you." He laid His own soul down upon those injunc- 
tions and promises, and so He became our Saviour. 

Memory goes back to-night to a little Methodist 
country church, where before the war prayer was 
wont to be made, as it now is also. Those fathers and 
mothers knew how to pray. Here is one of their oft- 
repeated thoughts: "We are traveling to eternity's 
bar as fast as the wheels of time can roll us on," 



168 PASTORAL HOMILIES 

uttered in sonorous tones and with great earnestness 
of spirit. An impression was left on the mind of a 
boyish auditor never to be erased. Its echo comes 
down along all these years until it reaches this last 
expression at the point of the writer's pen. I pass 
it on to you as hearers of the truth and as ministers 
who must every one give an account to God. Listen ! 
do you not hear its notes? "We are traveling to 
eternity's bar as fast as the wheels of time can roll 
us on." It reaches your ears and mine, and may we 
never be deaf to it until one by one we are called up 
and called home. "It is as when a man, sojourning 
in another country, having left his house, and given 
authority to his servants, to each one his work, com- 
manded also the porter to watch. Watch, therefore, 
for ye know not when the lord of the house cometh, 
whether at even, or at midnight, or at cock crowing, 
or in the morning; lest coming suddenly he find you 
sleeping. And what I say unto you I say unto all, 
Watch." "The Lord bless thee and keep thee; the 
Lord make His face shine upon thee, and be gracious 
unto thee; the Lord lift up His countenance upon 
thee, and give thee peace." 



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